The program, which moves to a two-tier model, will launch separately in the U.S. next week for legal reasons.
Benoit Amet, Partner Program Director, OVHcloud
This week, French-based hyperscale cloud provider OVH launched a revamped version of its OVHcloud Partner Program. The program moves from a four-tier model to a two tier one, with a separate Tier for Advanced Partners. The new program is active now in Canada and all of OVH’s other global markets – except the United States – which will launch next week.
“We compete with AWS and Azure, but we are small compared to them,” said Benoit Amet, Partner Program Director, OVHcloud. OVH offers a broad range of Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS] solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds. Unsurprisingly, they are very strong in their French home base, but they are also very strong in the south of Europe, and are also growing quickly in other countries including Germany and the U.K.
“We have a priority in expanding outside of Europe, and already have a strong presence in Canada,” Amet said. “We have been in the Canadian market since 2011. It was the first one outside of Europe that we tackled – and it is a very important one for us. We have one of our largest data centres outside of Montreal. A big part of our technical support is in Canada, and we build our servers there as well.”
OVH has a presence in the U.S., but it is a different company, legally.
“In the U.S., we bought data centres from VMware to establish a presence,” Amet noted. “We are also a separate legal entity there, OVH U.S.”
While OVH has been in business since 1999, their partner presence is more recent, but has become significant.
“We have worked a lot with partners over the last three to four years,” Amet noted. “Partners are not a huge part of our business, but they are important to address complex projects. We only sell infrastructure, so we need trusted partners to help partners with broader solutions, based on OVH infrastructure.”
OVH launched their first channel program in August 2018. The revamped focus is designed to clearly segment the broader partner tail from the strategic partners who have a strong mutual investment with OVH.
“In this program we address all types and all sizes, from small local agencies to worldwide partners like CapGemini and Deloitte,” Amet said.
The Partner level is for partners starting out with OVH. Their training is from video training courses through OVH webinars, and they have access to the whole sales and technical literature for OVH solutions.
“The Partner tier is for smaller partners but we want to make them grow,” Amet stressed. “They have a contract which is not exclusive, so they can do multi-cloud if they wish.”
The Advanced Partners receive a much deeper level of training. One of the major benefits for these partners is OVHcloud Partner Academy training programs around the sale, administration, and support of OVH solutions.
“Partner Academy existed before, but it was for customers, not partners,” Amet noted. “The training is deep and at the end of every session, there is a quiz. We want serious partners.”
Partner Academy is just for Advanced Partners – at least to start.
“We may possibly expand it to smaller partners later,” Amet said.
Advanced Partners also receive dedicated support from OVH, including individual annual target and performance monitoring and reviews, and a dedicated account manager.
“We will focus our sales force on the Advanced Partners, but will give a chance to small partners to grow with us as well,” Amet indicated. “In Europe we have partners who started very small with us and grew.”
The idea is to be fairly selective with the numbers of these Advanced Partners
“We want a lesser number of Advanced Partners, but want them to be better trained advanced partners,” Amet stressed. “We want them to subscribe to the right technical support level with us. “We want to have fewer partners this year and next year. We want to have the best partners, and to support them correctly.”
Next on the agenda is the OVH Partner Locator, which lists both partners and their competencies. It will include partners from both tiers, but give greater visibility to the Advanced Partners.
“We will launch this Partner Competency Directory, in a few months, before Christmas,” Amet said.
