Jitterbit’s increased investment in developing partner skillsets includes joint strategic business and marketing plans for their top two partner tiers, as well as new go-to-Market accelerators and enhanced technical enablement.
With the demand for their offerings expanding massively, Jitterbit has remade their partner program to more strongly train and support their channel to take advantage of the opportunities.
Jitterbit has been recognized by Gartner as a leader, for the third year in a row, in what Gartner calls Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service, where they compete in the top right of the Gartner Magic Quadrant with companies like Informatica and Dell Boomi.
“It is cloud-based APi integration,” said Andrew Leigh, Jitterbit’s vice president of global alliances and channels. “We get all the major business systems to talk to each other, including talking to all the cloud integrations and APIs available in the market today. We address the traditional middleware and integration space of the market, where the traditional on-prem middleware solutions are being replaced by enterprise iPaaS. Every company today, in every industry and every geography, is embarking on some kind of digital transformation project, which, when you lift the covers, is connecting the applications and APIs with modern services from players like Amazon and Google.”
Leigh said that while most vendors today provide open API options for integration, the kind of work that the IPaaS providers do go well beyond that.
“While most cloud platforms today deliver an API option, they address integration through open APIs only,” he stated. “It’s important to differentiate that this is not an integration strategy. APIs are simply interfaces. Open APIs don’t provide any level of connectivity or transportation, and deliver no level of process orchestration between systems and data. Today, the largest cloud platforms realize that an APi strategy is not enough, that there has to be end-to-end API integration.”
Jitterbit, like most of the companies in its space, began selling direct and added a channel to their go-to-market model as they grew.
“We started with a traditional direct model six years ago,” said Leigh, who has been in the alliances role at Jitterbit for over five years. “Early on, 80 per cent of our business came directly from customers who had embraced a new cloud platform, and needed to connect it to their on-prem and data of record. However, in the last four years, the partner component has grown to the point where partners are responsible for over half of all revenues. The channel has our highest amount of growth over the last 19 months, as integration and APIs have become a fundamental demand of their customers. Our channel is a blend of Tier 1 and Tier 2 system integrators, who recognize that this integration is now a core demand of their customers. They are chartered by their clients to deliver digital transformation projects that include hybrid integration and API projects. We provide them with a platform to do it at scale, to decrease time to value for their clients.”
With the segment showing a 70 per cent compound annual growth rate, and with only six per cent market penetration, Jitterbit has remade its partner program to best optimize that growth potential, by investing more deeply in a skilled core partner base.
Andrew Leigh, Jitterbit’s vice president of global alliances and channels.
“The new PoweredBy Jitterbit Program recognizes that we have to deliver a high touch service to our partners,” Leigh said. “We need to put in even more investment to deeply invest in their success. The program is not about extracting monies from a large partner ecosystem. It’s about enabling a system of experts who can deliver that transformation at a global scale, and provide that scale of API expertise that customers are demanding. Partners deepen that scale for us because they add additional value, around specific geos, verticals and business expertise.”
Leigh said that for Jitterbit, Partner First means that every time Jitterbit engages customers, it does so with their partners in mind.
“We look to bring their expertise together with our technology integration to our customers,” he said. “As an API integration company, we are exceptionally good at connecting digital components of a business, but leveraging partners’ industry, vertical or application expertise really makes our technology come alive.”
The new PoweredBy Jitterbit program is explicitly designed to help partners create specific strategies to solve digital transformation, API, and integration problems.
“Integration is challenging,” Leigh said. “It has always been hard. So we are providing a whole suite of complementary services to certify partners on the next wave of API architectures and digital integration strategies.
The new program has two elements – Go-to-Market accelerators and technical enablement.
“We are delivering a complete suite of Go-to-Market accelerators to our partners which include dedicated marketing resources, dedicated Go-to-Market plans and shared marketing investments, to allow them to build multi-million businesses on the back of our technical platform,” Leigh said. “We provide these accelerators for all our tiers in the program – Platinum, Gold and Sliver – although the most strategic accelerators are directed to the Platinum and Gold. All partner tiers also have dedicated enterprise level support SLAs for every customer.” The Platinum and Gold partners also participate in joint strategic business and marketing plans.
Enablement is assisted by additional new certifications for partners.
“We have always been certification-driven, but now we deliver complementary scoping, design and architecture reviews for all of our partners,” Leigh stated. “We have also rolled out a brand new partner website and a new authenticated partner portal with sales and technology training.”
Jitterbit has over 250 global partners with strategic partnerships with most major cloud or on-premises platform in the industry – the most recent being ERP vendor Epicor, whose partnership was announced last month. They work with hundreds of system integrators, and the new model supports multiple business models, including referral, reseller, MSP, and OEM.
“We are looking to maximize the success of our existing partners first, but due to the nature of our market, we are constantly recruiting and enabling new partners globally,” Leigh said. “We are actively recruiting partners with specific skills or vertical expertise, as well as cloud-based platforms that need to embed integration within their stack.”
