Beller talks with ChannelBuzz about how he intends to build on TIBCO’s recent history of driving its channel growth.
Tony Beller, TIBCO’s Senior Vice President, WorldWide Partner Ecosystem and OEM Sales
Today, TIBCO is launching their TIBCO NOW event, which like all events this year, has been virtualized. While the company’s main messaging will be around their strategy and new product around it, they are also using the invite to introduce two new senior executives. Tony Beller, who joined TIBCO earlier this year, is the new Senior Vice President, WorldWide Partner Ecosystem and OEM Sales. Jeff Hess, the Chief Customer Excellence Officer, joined TIBCO last fall. Beller talked with ChannelBuzz about how he intends to expand the company’s channel business.
Interestingly, Beller has spent much of his career at channel-facing roles in companies which were largely or entirely direct historically – Salesforce, ServiceNow and Anaplan – at each of which he built up a channel presence. At Salesforce, where he spent a decade, he was ultimately Vice President of Alliances & Channels Enterprise Go to Market, while at both ServiceNow and Anaplan, he was VP of Worldwide Channels.
“Salesforce was a very direct-centric company, and I helped develop their channel business, including their systems integrator channel,” Beller told ChannelBuzz. “I did the same at ServiceNow, driving more business through their MSP channel, which is now about 35% of the total. With Anaplan, I helped them get into the reseller channel.”
TIBCO is already in the channel. The company’s legacy as an on-prem company was primarily direct, but their 2014 acquisition by Vista Equity partners and their coincident shift in emphasis to the cloud led to an emphasis on bolstering the partner ecosystem. That has been accelerating since the appointment of Dan Streetman as CEO in April 2019. Streetman was SVP of Worldwide Alliances and Channels at Salesforce between 2012 and 2016.
“Today our channel is very strong,” Beller said. “We have a lot of resellers and distributors around the globe. We have systems integrator partners as well, but the majority is VARs and resellers. We do need to strengthen the channel however. Many of them seem to be very, very narrow in terms of what they sell, and we want to broaden that.”
The cloud is also underdeveloped on the channel side.
“We partner with the big public cloud players, and there is a huge opportunity for partners to engage there,” Beller said. “In addition, while we have some managed services partners, we don’t do a lot of that, and there is a huge opportunity there, especially now with our public cloud offerings.”
Expanding the depth and breadth of OEM relationships is also a priority.
“We have a big global portfolio, but I also think that we haven’t tapped into newer partners,” Beller indicated. “Some GSIs have massive OEM channels, and I love to partner with ones like Deloitte and Accenture. Incorporating our OEM channel into our overarching partner program is something that we will be looking into as well.”
TIBCO already has a strong array of industry solutions in place, but the policy here is that you really can’t have too much of a good thing.
“We want to see more of these industry solutions,” Beller said. “We also want to develop more around innovation with the cloud vendors and more three-way partnerships. If partners do integration, I’d like them to do more analytics, which , is part of helping them expand their capabilities across all of our products. As I get fully onboarded and I learn more about the company, Ill have a better idea of what can be done there.”
Ultimately, Beller said that TIBCO’s strategy has to revolve around driving partner innovation to bring about customer success.
“We are manically focussed on customer success and we want our partners to share that innovation,” he indicated. “Getting partners to becoming involved in building an industry solution we can take to market together – that’s innovation to me. That’s something like an oil and gas solution built on AWS and TIBCO and then taking it to market by a channel partner. That’s something that also been building since the beginning of the year with COVID, which has increased interest by many conservatives to change the way that they work.”
