The new portal, which improves ease of use and adds new functionality, is designed for reseller partners, but similar support for MSPs through the portal is on the way.
Boise-based WAN wireless edge networking specialist Cradlepoint has launched Cradlepoint Cascade, a new partner portal to better allow Cradlepoint’s channel partners to monetize Cradlepoint’s solutions around 5G and Wireless WAN.
Eric Purcell, senior vice president of global partner sales at Cradlepoint
“This spring, from a partner perspective, we announced new investments in people, bringing in additional channel resources, as well as investments in programs, including an industry-first 5G specialization for the enterprise,” said Eric Purcell, senior vice president of global partner sales at Cradlepoint. “The third piece of these announcements is around platform – enabling partners to more easily build a successful practice with a greatly improved partner portal. We did a soft launch during our partner summit in April, and are formally announcing it now.”
The new portal contains multiple ease of use improvements that were not present in its predecessor.
“Our old portal was built off a different system, and there were a lot of limitations on what we could expose,” said Michelle Obrochta, Cradlepoint Senior Global Partner Program Manager. “Driving demand was also limited. We could not show partners trends of what customers were doing today, or around deal registrations. If we wanted to start lead demand generation, we could only do it in a Zip drive download. It wasn’t seamless at all.”
A more efficient portal was necessary to drive Cradlepoint’s global expansion plans.
“We were really looking at expanding globally, and we needed a really scalable platform to help us scale globally,” Purcell said. “It needed to have the acceleration required for partners to build a 5G wireless LAN practice, and for them to see what’s new in their journey.”
Obrochta described the new Cradlepoint Cascade portal as about half the result of internal development, and about half from the expertise of a PRM company.
“The PRM company provided us with best practices from other vendors, and our own experience with NetCloud Manager was very valuable as well,” Obrochta said.
“Our advisory council also played a critical role in the evolution of this,” Purcell added. “Last year, we scoped the product out for nine months, then worked with a partner co-create group within our ecosystem, and came back to them every two months.”
The Cascade platform features single pane of glass experience for partners, along with an improved collection of resources.
Michelle Obrochta, Cradlepoint Senior Global Partner Program Manager
“It provides more information about current customers, and also provides information to generate new opportunities,” Obrochta said. “The new customer information includes more visibility into subscriptions, so partners can better show what their support cases look like, and see how customers are working with Cradlepoint so they can improve the experience.” Partners can now see how many licenses each one of their customers has, how many are being used, and which ones are in or out of compliance. They can also see exactly when subscriptions expire and when they are up for renewal.
New PRM capabilities have also been introduced to the portal.
“With the PRM tool, partners can now create their own micro-landing sites, and there is a new asset library which they can cobrand,” Obrochta indicated. “There are also new deal registration aspects, which allows a salesperson to understand what they should be doing in their first 30 and 60 days to be successful.”
Changes to deal registration have also been made to make things easier for larger partners.
“This removes something that we haven’t been able to do for large partners,” Obrochta said. “They have sales admins who want to be able to drive deal reg on behalf of sales reps. So now you don’t have to be the rep to do this. You can do it on behalf of the rep. We can now also tell them the sales rep from Cradlepoint who is working the opportunity with them.”
Partners can access Cradlepoint’s 5G for Enterprise Branch Specialization through the portal.
“This was our first enterprise specialization,” Purcell said. “You have to have a wireless WAN practice and offer the right services.”
The portal is also expandable to service MSP partners going forward.
“There are things in the works,” Obrochta said. “This is for the resell motion now, but we also want to be able to manage this business practice for MSPs.”
