Kroll Ontrack hopes to double its resellers in New Zealand by 2012 through new customer service appointments and the use of its online portal.

The data recovery provider currently has 25 partners across the country, expecting to finalise a 26th in the new few weeks, and hopes to expand it's reseller deals by 50% within six months.

The company also announced the use of its online portal, giving partners the ability to self-serve while addressing the demand to data stored on older tape media.

“The portal gives the op for partner to self-service so they can actually go to the web page, put the job in and dispatch it to us, and follow the process to the lab and they can either accept or decline depending on the result,” says Adrian Briscoe, regional manager Kroll.

“For people moving away from tape to disk, they need the ability to restore tape when required.

“That’s maybe two or three times a year. But the tape service allows them not to have to maintain their original backup agent, and that can be a significant cost saving. They use our services to extract data on an ad hoc basis.”

Briscoe believes the portal will help encourage growth in New Zealand for the company, as well as the appointments of Rebecca Armstrong and Amelia Connor as customer service executives.

“People don’t have to speak to anyone, they just log in the work remotely," he says.

"For support, we have informational videos to tell them how to handle recovery and we’re trying to otherwise empower the partners as best as possible.

"We certainly see an increase in data recovery work not only in Oz, but in NZ as well.”

“We have I guess quite an extensive network of partners, and what we wanted to do was to expand the network further.

"We’re seeing growth in the complexity of recovery now, so where increasingly you buy a harddrive with encryption. Most branded drives have some kind of encryption.

"We work with WD [Western Digital] helping their clients, we work with Apple service providers to assist their clients. And on the hypervisor side, we work quite closely with VMWare.”