RevMatch now essentially becomes the top tier of a new two-tier program, which adds new features and benefits for partners.
Mario Blandini, iXsystems’ VP of Marketing
San Jose-based open storage solutions provider iXsystems, which launched their first channel program, RevMatch, a little over a year ago, has launched a followup expansion, their TruePartner Channel Partner Program. RevMatch is now a feature within this expanded program.
“Our original IXsystems partner program did not actually have a name,” said Mario Blandini, iXsystems’ VP of Marketing. It had a feature – RevMatch. We are now working on cleaning up some of the branding stuff. We also now have a name for the program. We also now we have some new things that were not part of the original RevMatch.”
RevMatch remains a core feature of the new program, however. RevMatch is designed to level the competitive playing field for partners by providing dollar-for-dollar revenue matching by iXsystems on new business generated. That in itself will double the partner’s revenues. However, iXsystems also says that their margins are higher, raising revenue gains to as high as three times those of other vendors.
“The way that RevMatch works remains the same,” Blandini said. “It is different from the typical channel shared-effort, shared-reward model. The way that it fits into the new program is that we have a Registered Partner tier and a Preferred Partner Tier, and RevMatch is the Preferred Tier. They get higher margins and the RevMatch component of it.”
Blandini said that the maturation of the company’s business-optimized Open Storage fills a void in the market.
“It has all changed,” he stated. “Ten years ago, a NAS was much simpler, but now we have gotten to the point where almost all the offerings have a very large number of interfaces. As people try to put apps in the cloud, they are looking for this capability. As a result, iXSystems grew over 70% last year and is approaching triple digits in terms of millions of dollars of revenue – all through partners.”
Blandini said that while the old days of large storage margins on hardware are long gone, iXsystems is able to compensate somewhat because of their compensation model.
“We offer partners an experience one like where they made a lot of money making hardware, even though macro conditions are worse than before the pandemic, because of inflation,” he indicated. “We don’t have the same margins, but we do have RevMatch.”
Blandini said that iXsystems has a relatively large number of partners for a small company.
“Those who thrive in RevMatch have the ability to do some marketing,” he stated. “They don’t need a full marketing team, but they need to be interested in featuring the product. Some are small, but just sell us, which is how they qualify for RevMatch. We are also seeing our deal size also go up. We eliminated the FreeNAS brand last year, which allowed partners to have more success positioning it. TrueNAS Free is now the free brand, while TrueNAS Enterprise is the paid one.”
The new partner program has some distinct features.
“We put a buddy system together that provides iXsystems, technical engineers, pre- and post-sales support, and marketing,” Blandini noted. Higher margins are provided on partner-registered opportunities. Inside sales integration and collaboration is also co-ordinated to drive joint meetings and leads. There is also an NFR [Not for Retail] program to provide demonstration units.
