The program has been reworked from the one CloudJumper brought when it spun out from nGenx, but the real highlight is the capabilities of the new portal.
JD Helms, CloudJumper’s President
CloudJumper, a Workspace as a Service (WaaS) platform provider, which spun out from nGenx earlier this year, has made a couple key announcements to better enable partners. They have introduced the CloudJumper Channel Partner Program, with specific support for MSPs, ISVs, agents, and other IT service providers. They have also announced a new portal – which they say has data analytics functionality that goes far beyond what portals typically provide.
“Workspace as a Service finally seems to be catching on,” said JD Helms, CloudJumper’s President. “We are seeing consistent growth, with sales up more than twice what they were this time last year.”
The partner program being launched is significantly different from the one that had been in place at nGenx, and which was brought over to CloudJumper while the new program was being designed.
“It’s a reworking and enhancement of the program that was inherited from nGenx,” Helms said. “We have incorporated and codified in things we’ve learned around both pricing and training. For example, the old program never gave a better price if you brought in more users.”
These capabilities are made possible by the portal, which CloudJumper describes as an industry-pioneering engagement platform for web-based quoting and ordering.
“Calling it a portal is somewhat of a misnomer,” Helms said. “It’s a big data analytics tool that encompasses things you expect in a portal, and a lot of what we are now able to do is empowered by the portal.”
Helms said that deal registration and quote tracking have become table stakes in terms of what partners expect, but that CloudJumper’s portal goes further.
“The hardest thing in trying to build a quote is that it is typically really complicated to put all components together and build out a price,” he stated. “We boil it down to five or six questions and get a quote within 5-10 per cent accuracy. You can click a button to place the order, which then builds out the cloud environment.
“Once a partner starts bringing customers in, it takes the next step, with Big Data analytics,” Helms continued. “It looks at how many customers, and applications there are, which users have them and which use them. It puts a lot of data and power at the fingerprints of partners. It provides the real time data needed to understand the costs of the cloud environment.”
The portal also provides financial reporting with on-demand access to detailed billing information. It offers service discounting based on account size, pricing estimates for new accounts, onboarding support, and white label billing. It also contains the sales and marketing collateral that portals typically contain.
“Deal registration was always a massive challenge, but with this new portal it’s now a simple thing to deliver,” Helms said.
“Our goal by adding value through the portal system is to be the best partner in the WaaS environment,” Helms stated.
CloudJumper sells entirely through partners, and probably the biggest change to the structure of the program itself is that all qualifications formerly necessary to become a partner have been removed.
“There used to be a minimum requirement to become a partner, to protect ourselves from being deluged,” Helms said. “As we have become more efficient internally and developed these tools, we have dropped that.”
Other program features include a loyalty program, with SPIFs and MDF, rebates, a cloud marketing toolkit, specialized technical training (on-line, and instructor-led) and specialized sales training (face-to-face, online, and instructor led). Cloud-specific ROI/TCO calculator tools to be used with end-users are provided. There is also a demo program with trial keys.
