Gigamon decided last year that its professional services would be purely a partner play, and accordingly, has formalized and expanded the assistance it was offering informally to partners in professional services in order to enable significantly more partners.
Barbara Spicek, Vice President of Channel Sales at Gigamon
Network visibility vendor Gigamon, whose traditional business providing visibility into physical and virtual network traffic has more recently been complemented by their use in network security, has expanded their channel offerings with a new program to develop partner professional services. The Professional Service Partner Program is aimed at both Gigamon’s traditional and security-focused partners. It also features a collaborative, vendor-assisted model to help partners develop professional services, rather than simply making an appropriate certification available.
“Gigamon is not doing professional services on our own at all,” said Barbara Spicek, Vice President of Channel Sales at Gigamon. “We did a little of it in 2014 and 2015, but in 2015 we decided we wanted this to be a pure partner model.”
Some of Gigamon’s partners have previously been offering professional services, and Gigamon had been providing ad hoc support. Spicek said that the time was now right to establish a complete, formal program which would make Gigamon’s support more systematic, and be able to get many more partners involved in professional services opportunities.
“We have now formalized this into a complete program,” she said. “We want to get more of our existing network visibility-focused partners in, and we also want to get security partners that we are recruiting into the program more involved in professional services. I expect many of our classic network operations partners will join this program to develop a more profitable business model. We are seeing a lot of interest from SIs with security practices as well.”
Demand for professional services is being increased significantly by the continued growth of infrastructure, network design complexity, and the shortage of internal specialists to handle these issues.
“Some partners are already putting full architectures for customers together,” Spicek said. “For the partner, it means more profitability through higher margins, as well as increasing their technical skillset. That’s a big value proposition.”
Gigamon’s Professional Service Partner Program is designed to help partners establish a professional services practice through a collaborative vendor-assisted model.
“We really tried to make the enablement part very easy for our partners,” Spicek said. “Partners start with self-assessment. The program then offers a series of training modules, and a lab they can access as they build out their practices. We see this as a stronger alternative to just providing a certification. It’s a collaborative model of getting them appropriately skilled, rather than just offering a certification.”
Spicek said that the platform-based nature of Gigamon’s offering fits well into the portfolios of SIs and other partners who want to offer a broad range of services with professional services capability on top.
“We are a platform that enables a broader portfolio, and lets the partner offer a complete solution and an architecture to the customer,” she said. “Our platform lets SIs attach tools to it to make money. We also find that we are typically only about 20 per cent of the opportunity for the partner, so the additional 80 per cent of the deal makes working with us attractive.”
Gigamon’s Professional Service Partner Program is operational now.
