While Riverbed has made major changes to how it is organized, to remove friction and focus on strengths, the channel strategy has been fine-tuned to improve alignment with partners.

Last fall, former Mitel CEO Rich McBee moved to Riverbed to take over a company that had started out at the cutting edge of WAN optimization, but ran into problems as they reacted to market developments and expanded their solutions portfolio. McBee quickly implemented major changes in Riverbed’s corporate strategy. While the channel strategy has not been impacted to the same degree, there have been changes, with Riverbed looking to drive tighter alignment, particularly with their top-performing partners.

The new company strategy hinges on McBee, who came to Riverbed from Mitel with the reputation as a turnaround expert.

“We had kind of lost our way, with things like Aternity,” said Bridgette Bisnette, Senior Vice President Global Partner Sales at Riverbed. “We are now bringing it back home, and aligning to the new strategy with the new CEO. Riverbed as a company is all about performance and visibility and we needed to get our core strategy back and align the components of our strategy accordingly.”

Bisnette said the changes started as soon as McBee arrived.

“The first thing he did when he came in was listened to employees,” she said. “Coming in, he had his own perception of our brand – that we had lost our way. From 800 pages of survey comments, he found two things, which was a  good news and bad news kind of thing.”

The good news was that the number one finding  was that employees believed in the company and the technology and wanted it to succeed.

“On the other hand, the other finding was that we had no strategy,” Bisnette indicated. “So he created a platform based on those ideas, leveraging high employee morale and spirit, but dealing with the fact there was no strategy.”

Bisnette indicated that McBee’s first move was identifying friction in the company’s operations that had been a key obstacle.

“He realigned everything, to remove friction across the entire value chain,” Bisnette said. “Before, we had siloes of product groups. This was simplified so that everyone who touches customers and partners reported to the COO [Dan Smoot] and everyone who touches product reported to the Chief Development Officer [Dante Malagrino]. Everything was simplified, around what we sell and who we sell it to.”

This included divesting the Aternity business, which had been acquired and integrated into SteelCentral to provide device information within their network performance management, but which turned out to be a poor alignment fit with the rest of that business.

“In refining the company strategy, he took the Aternity business and spun it out into a separate business as a standalone company, as of January,” Bisnette said. “It turned out to be very distracting, in part because it had a completely separate sales motion.”

The messaging and mission were also simplified around the company’s core strengths of doing the complex well and having the ability to make networks and applications work better. This is encapsulated in a new four-quadrant strategy that rolled out in January.

“The new strategy framework simplified messaging and mission, and organized  our offerings into four quadrants,” Bisnette stated. “The first quadrant, our WAN optimization, customers are still buying. The second, SaaS acceleration, has no one in that quadrant. There is zero competition. With work from home, this has jumped 200-300% because of the need to deliver application performance back to the client. The third area, network performance management, is a crowded one, but we have been growing there in the 20s and 30s over the last year and a half, because we have the only offering that inspects every packet and every flow. The fourth quadrant is SD-WAN, where we signed an OEM agreement with Versa last year to strengthen us there. And we have the three other quadrants that complement SD WAN. McBee did all of this in less than 60 days.”

Major shifts have also been made in how partner strategy is executed. This was not a complete programmatic overhaul comparable to what Riverbed announced in early 2018, when they gutted the old program and brought in the simpler Riverbed RISE as a replacement.

“We designed the program for flexibility, and it has a framework that lets us tweak up and down  in terms of things like rewards and enablement activities,” Bisnette said. “It was designed with that flexible concept, and it was wildly successful that first year.”

In 2019 – not so much.

“Last year, we tweaked it as our strategy changed, and it was probably not a great example of execution,” Bisnette said. The focus this year, directed by McBee, has been to focus on completely reinvigorating relationships with key channel partners.

“In December, when we were preparing for our 2020 sales kickoff meeting in Las Vegas in January, he asked why our partners aren’t there, and that he wanted them there,” she said. “So we reorganized it and wound up with 75 partners there from 50 different companies. It was highly effective. This is about defining the significant role that partners play in our Go-to-Market, and that partners are key to our success.”

Bisnette said that Riverbed is focusing on deepening the alignment with their key partners in 2020 – coronavirus quarantines notwithstanding.

“Everything has to be virtual and on video,” she said. “We had an online meeting with one major partner with five execs. We were all on video and they weren’t. Rich sent emails to some of the largest companies in the world reaching out –  Orange, NTT, Verizon. Their leaders replied and we got calls set up. We aren’t stopping our road shows because we have to go virtual. We just have to be more aggressive, and our field sales leaders are still doing the next level of engagement, trying to fill that void.”

For 2020, Riverbed is also placing more of its own resources in its top partners, while incenting distribution to get more results from the long tail.

“We have done a segmentation strategy with the channel, where we identified our top partners by country and bifurcated for high touch engagement with those 45 or so partners,” Bisnette stated. “They receive incentives directly from us. We have incentivized our distributors to grow the next set of top partners, and will pay them incentives for growth. This system was implemented January 1.”

Riverbed has also implemented a country tiering model. Tier One countries have a  joint partner go to market. Tier Two countries have a partner-led model with higher incentives. Tier Three is more opportunistic. Canada is a Tier One country.

Changes have been made on the programmatic side to the RISE program in its third year.

“We have broadened the rewards portion to include all four quadrants, including significantly increasing rewards for when a partner initiates an opportunity,” Bisnette said. “A further initiative has been driven by Rich and Dan. Traditionally, we have enabled our own salespeople on new content and 3-4 months later, it goes out to partners. Now partners get the content at the same time.” Steelhead 101 and SD WAN 101 have already been rolled out and NPM 101 is rolling out at the end of the month.

“Rich’s style is permeating down to our channel strategy as well,” Bisnette concluded. “You have to be intentional and clear so your people can execute. We are much more clear and deliberate than before.”