Gul Paryani lays out the channel vision for the company going forward, and says that the Ingram Micro Award for Emerging Vendor of the Year will help their efforts considerably.
Gul ParyaniVice President of Global Channels, Morpheus Data
In late July, Morpheus Data, which makes a hybrid cloud management and application infrastructure automation and orchestration engine, announced a series of new channel enablement initiatives, which doubled their channel investment. Today, they are following up on that with the announcement of the first separate channel leader at a VP level. They also are announcing that have been named “Vendor of the Year – Emerging Vendor,” by distributor Ingram Micro.
“As an organization, we are putting a significant investment back in the company,” said Brad Parks, Morpheus Data’s CMO. “This includes a greater investment in channels but also in our sales teams, marketing and engineering. Our ability to sell and service customers is improved greatly by our focus on the channel.”
Until now ,the channel leader role was covered by COO Tina Valdez wearing multiple hats. The new Vice President of Global Channels, Gul Paryani, is an internal promotion, who had previously been Channel Director, East. Parks said that this was the time in the company’s growth cycle to create a separate Channels VP.
“In going from 10 to 30 to 50 to 100 million, there are a series of inflection points,” he said. “This sets us up for that next level of growth over the next couple of years.”
“A few things are going on in terms to where we are as a company, which reflect on where we are going,” Paryani said. “Me coming into this role is one of those. We are also expanding the team, and these new fresh eyes give me a different perspective on what data we capture.”
This is Paryani’s first overall channel leadership role, but he emphasized that his career has been filled with channel-focused roles.
“This is my seventh startup,” he said. “I’m an SE by trade, but I have always been in channel-building roles. I didn’t know there was anything but channel until I joined later companies.”
Paryani stressed that Morpheus Data would continue working to make life easier for its channel.
“Over the last few years, the industry has recognized that we love our channel partners,” he said. “Now the issue is how do we create less friction in the interaction through their deal lifecycle? How do we make that easier? We are putting more humans in the field. This year, we also created a dedicated technical team for our partners to make sure that partner techies are really well educated on what we do. If we want the rocket ship to move faster, the technical sellers need to be really proficient.”
Paryani said interest from the channel has intensified as a result,
“2020 was an inflection point in terms of the number of channel partners coming to find us,” he indicated. “I was overwhelmed with activity. I met over 500 individuals between the beginning of November and the beginning of May. These also represented an increase in quality engagements.”
Paryani said that looking forward, they don’t see any big changes on the horizon, but want to continue to reward partners for doing great things.
“I don’t see us doing anything radically different,” he noted. “It’s taking the foundation of the house and shoring it up a bit and giving a focus on the things we want to drive in 2022. Our spiff program was improved in the July announcement. Over the course of 2021, we moved from a two-tier partner program to a three-tier one, to make top the two tiers particularly rewarding and equitable for performing partners. Our goal is to be simple.”
Paryani also emphasized that the winning of the Ingram Micro award was of enormous significance to Morpheus Data.
“The large distributors have many startup partners, and they select a couple dozen as award nominees,” he said. “Once nominations happen, the group makes a decision based on things like how well partners want to work with them, as well as the company’s Ingram-facing programs. We have worked with Ingram for about 18 months and came away with the award in our first full year.”
Paryani said Ingram is increasing Morpheus Data’s visibility across the partner community.
“They are doing select recruiting for us, and they have found us some perfect partners – some real home runs,” he stated. “We aren’t aggressively looking for new partners, but we are always looking for great partners. Awards like this help us do that.”
