March 28, 2012 - ownCloud Launches Partner Program, Announces Partnerships Across the Globe

ownCloud Inc. partners with eRacks and other firms, providing preloaded cloud environments for servers.

Source: ownCloud Inc.
Date: March 28, 2012 09:00 ET

NASDAQ OM Globe Newswire

BOSTON, March 28, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ownCloud Inc., the commercial entity behind the popular open source, hybrid cloud file sync and share project, today launched a partner program that offers customer referrals, marketing and technical support, discounts -- and more -- to solution partners worldwide.

Hardware partners can preload ownCloud on ready-to-run hardware, including storage and technology partners have individualized go-to-market programs designed specifically for co-selling between the partner and ownCloud.

In conjunction with the program, the company also announced partnerships with companies in Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific.

"Our partners have ample opportunity to leverage their expertise - whether hardware, hosted services, or consulting and implementation skills - to build margin with a competitive addition to their portfolio," said Holger Dyroff, founder and vice president, Sales & Marketing, ownCloud. "Customers get an innovative, secure and flexible answer to their file sharing pains. It is a win-win for everyone."

With more than 400,000 users (and growing rapidly) of the community edition, ownCloud offers the ease-of-use of Dropbox with a more flexible, secure offering. Because it's open source, ownCloud offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in, and pulls in innovative features from the community. ownCloud users can run their own file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage, use popular public hosting and storage offerings, or both. Commercial offerings are due to be announced next week.

About the ownCloud Partner Program

The ownCloud program for channel partners has a three tier structure that includes discounts, marketing and technical support as well as joint selling opportunities. More information can be found at www.owncloud.com/partner.

Partners can use ownCloud to:

· Deliver a secure and controlled environment for customers' file syncing and sharing --either on premises or hosted in a trusted environment.

· Access data and files from mobile devices - including iPads.

· Access confidential data and files without the complexities of a VPN.

· Augment VDI solutions with a file sync and share option - giving users easy, secure access to their files, even when they are not logged on to the virtual desktop.

· Provide ownCloud as a feature of a larger offering - from OEM residential gateways through to hosted online backup services - providing file sync and share as a complementary service.

· Help customers migrate off MobileMe and onto a platform independent, more flexible sync and share platform hosted by the partner.

OwnCloud Partners

ownCloud also announced it has signed partnership deals with:

· Ancud IT, a leading provider of open source solutions - as systems integrator, consultant and software developer.

· B1 Systems, offering individual advice, professional consulting, specific development, continuous support and qualified training for medium-sized and major enterprises from industry, commerce and the services sector as well as for government authorities.

· COCONET-US: supports the needs of academic institutions, with a focus on K-12, both private and public, enabling new and innovative teaching methods, collaborative sharing amongst faculty and expanded reach to students all over the world.

· dass IT; specializing in tailor-made open source solutions with a focus on high-available Linux systems, systems management and open source backup solutions.

· Eight Systems, provides "infinite solutions" - the eternal search for the best solution in computing, whether in person or in the cloud.

· eRacks provides high-performance, competitively-priced open source rackmount servers, desktop computers, as well as a wide array of services including open source enterprise migration, security, and network architecture design.

· Hostserver GmbH is a specialist for sophisticated and individual managed hosting solutions, as well as for domain and name service. All key services are certified under ISO 9001:2008.

· Housingcenter - provider of infrastructure, cloud and managed services in Benelux with datacenters and a datacenter-redundant cloud platform operating from 3 datacenters in Belgium.

· InTech Solutions offers a wide array of information technology solutions, including the traditional services such as file/print/email/database implementations, as well as services in some of the cutting-edge technologies, such as, virtualization (server and desktop), cloud based computing (ITaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and corporate based social networking implementations.

· Kangaroot has been Belgium's number one Linux and open source service provider since 2000.

· Open Software Solutions is an independent solution partner for organizational software.

· Overt Software Solutions' initiatives allow organizations to adopt cloud computing and network edge consolidation to maximize application availability and minimize costs within the public and private IT sectors.

· Senath is an information technology consultancy focused on delivering cost effective information system solutions for small and medium sized businesses to large enterprises and government agencies.

· Strictcloud provides a highly integrated series of professional services that include consulting, governance and security.

ownCloud also previously announced a partnership with Univention.

ownCloud began at a KDE community event in 2010, aiming to bring greater flexibility, access and security to data in the cloud. ownCloud enables universal access to files through the widely implemented WebDAV standard, providing a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across devices while supporting sharing, viewing and editing via the web interface. Installation has minimal server requirements, doesn't need special permissions and is quick. ownCloud is extendable via a simple, powerful API for applications. For more information, please visit: http://www.owncloud.org

About ownCloud Community Edition Version 3

ownCloud Version 3 enables users to share files and folders from their privately controlled infrastructure. Major new features in this release include: the ownCloud application store, which allows users to take advantage of the extensibility of ownCloud; and, directly edit text file capabilities from a browser. ownCloud is the only technology to offer such functionality made possible by its open and modular nature.

ownCloud Community

Since the release of Version 2 in October, the ownCloud community has enabled ownCloud for Juju Charms (Ubuntu) and built pre-configured software and virtual appliances ready for direct deployment in SUSE Studio.

About ownCloud Inc.

Based on the popular ownCloud open source community project, ownCloud Inc. was founded in 2011 to bring greater flexibility, access and security to unstructured data in enterprises. Company headquarters are in Boston, with European headquarters are in Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, visit: http://www.owncloud.com.

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CONTACT: Joe Eckert, jeckert@owncloud.com 203-300-2649