At the Partner Keynote that opened the TIBCO NOW event, TIBCO announced impending changes to the partner program, including a move to a multi-track model, and a new marketing tool.

Today, at the TIBCO NOW event, things kicked off with the company’s Partner Keynote. TIBCO stressed the relevance of the themes of the event – growth, innovation and customer excellence – to the partner community. They also telegraphed some changes that are not in place today, but which are coming in the near future.

“There has never been a better time to partner with TIBCO,” said Tony Beller, TIBCO’s Senior Vice President, WorldWide Partner Ecosystem and OEM Sales. “We have the foundation of a great program that gives the tools to be successful. But it is time now to evolve that and move to the next level of maturity

Beller emphasized that major changes are coming to the partner program.

“It’s time to grow our partner program, and we have got to make some changes,” he said. “Today, it’s one size fits all, but we now have a diverse and fast-growing ecosystem. Our goal is to make sure we meet you where your business model is. And the more you invest with us the more we invest back.”

The changes to the program will involve a new marketing tool.

“We will help you better with this new tool, Marketing Launchpad,” Beller said,

“The Partner Marketing Launchpad will bring about successful partner co-marketing,” said Fred Studer, TIBCO’s CMO. “It’s a one button campaign in a box,  automated with cobranding and integrated social media posting and sharing. It’s like my team and your team are in complete lockstep.”

Beller also stressed that TIBCO is doubling down on its investments around innovation.

“We are investing a lot of money and resources in innovation,” he said. “We know that a lot of your Go to Market selling solutions to your customers to solve industry problems relevant to your customers. We want to work with you to take solutions to market. So we are making changes to our partner portal so that if you take solutions to market with us, you appear in a solution listing section on the website. This is super exciting for us, and a new thing for us to help take solutions to market.”

“We have re-engineered our partner web presence with this enhanced partner solutions directory,” Struder added. “It’s a place to showcase all of the amazing work you have done. Get ready to submit your solutions starting in October.”

The customer excellence focus involves sharing TIBCO’s customer excellence framework with partners.

“Customer excellence is so important to us,” Beller said. “It’s one of our core values that goes across the entire customer journey. For partners who collaborate with us, we will be sharing our Customer Excellence Framework around our best practices and provide access to our internal collaboration. It’s a great benefit for partners.”

Jeff Hess, TIBCO’s Chief Customer Excellence Officer, noted that Gartner recently cited TIBCO’s framework as a best practice.

“We cannot deliver customer excellence at scale without you,” Hess told partners in the partner keynote.

“As we move forward together, we will open our coffers to you, with systems and best practices to deliver customer excellence,” Hess added. He noted that today, TIBCO has four vertically-focused communities around this up and running, with four more verticals coming in the months ahead.

Hess emphasized that the focus has been to pivot Tibco from an inside-out product focus to an outside-in customer-centric business model.

“When we talk about customer excellence at TIBCO, we talk about transforming Go-to-Market by integrating the front end with the back end,” Hess said. “We  pivoted aggressively to a value-based business impact selling motion. Beyond that, we have built scalable value realization, and we have created a link between sales and realization, through my organization. That’s very different for TIBCO, and for most companies. We have also changed our compensation models and linchpins between sales and engineering teams. We have created new standards and highly-scaled delivery templates for every activity in the model.”