Sunnyvale CA-based Kaviza, which offers a desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) solution SMEs can afford, has formally announced its' partner program as well as the first two partners who have qualified as Premier partners, Entisys Solutions and Agile360.

"The company started out to address problems in desktop virtualization," said Krishna Subramanian, COO, Marketing, Sales & Alliances at Kaviza. The company's founders, Kumar K. Goswami and Michael Peercy, led up VDI initiatives at HP and IBM respectively. "They saw VDI was too costly and complex for customers to deploy, and that there had to be a better way to architect it, so that it was less expensive and easier to manage than a PC."

Kaviza brought its VDI-in-a-box solution to market last October, using a 100 percent channel fulfilment strategy. While it was thus working with partners from the beginning, the company is just now announcing its' formal channel program, the Kaviza Partner and Solutions Network (KPSN).

"The channel has a very important play for us," Subramanian said. "The channel puts the pieces around the product to build a complete solution."

Kaviza is targeting the SME spot in the market, as well as departments within enterprise companies because they are the clearest market opportunity.

"With other solutions, you need to virtualize thousands of desktops before you see a positive return," Subramanian said. "Our focus is on customers who want an immediate ROI, who want the freedom to virtualize as many or as few desktops as they see a need for. Companies who have 1000 desktops typically won't do them all on phase one. They will roll them out in phases, and want to see a ROI every step of the way."

Subramanian emphasized, however, that their solution can scale well above this market.

"It is more scalable than current architectures on the market today," she said. 'There's no limit to the scalability of the product. As demand grows, you just add more commodity boxes."

"It's a good product arriving in the market at the right time with the right industry support," said Mike Strohl, CEO of Concord CA-based Entisys Solutions, one of the two new Premium partners, who has been involved in organizing a national consortium of Kaviza partners. Kaviza is recognized as a top partner of both Citrix and VMware.

"We want partners who fit two criteria," Subramanian said. "Some desktop management expertise is one, and a commitment to delivering an affordable solution is another. The market we are targeting is not a high consulting revenue type of product."

The two tier partner program emphasizes close alignment between partner and vendor, in training, brainstorming and creating prepacked solutions for specific verticals It also has attractive and expected features like deal registration, where the registered partner gets points even if someone else closes the deal. Kaviza works with all partners -- not just the Premier ones -- on joint sales calls, webinars and lunch-and-learns.

Subramanian said that they have approximately 25 partners today, and that the idea as they grow this is to get quality relationships.

"We think there is appeal in getting involved with a company early in its growth and share in its' upside," she said.