Alteryx's shift to a partner-led strategy, their expansion of their ISV ecosystem, and their encouraging of joint sales between themselves, partners and ISVs, has led to a major increase in channel business.
Barb Huelskamp, senior vice president of global partners and alliances at Alteryx
Analytics automation company Alteryx undertook a significant overhaul of their partner program in March in order to increase their enterprise presence through a partner-led model. This has led to a significant uptick in their channel business since then. They are also making a strong push around partnerships with ISVs, including one that strengthens their relationship with cloud data company Snowflake, and which will see Alteryx listed on the Snowflake Marketplace.
“We focused this year on activating our community – not about getting a higher quantity of partners, but improving the strategic focus of partners around us,” said Barb Huelskamp, senior vice president of global partners and alliances at Alteryx. “When we can approach a strategic partner or GSI where they have also invested in us, that’s a home run. If customers have invested in multiple technologies, our partners can help bring them together.”
Today, Alteryx has hundreds of partners, with more of them being activated than before.
“We are making sure that they are properly onboarded with the right enablement and resources to get them to their first sale,” Huelskamp said. “Presidio and SHI are now among our new partners in North America. Among GSIs, KPMG and CapGemini are new ones. Last year we had a few GSI partners and now we have five or six transacting. We saw over 120 % YOY growth influenced by those technology partners in Q3 this year.” They also saw double-digit YOY growth in partner accounts contributing one or more deals per quarter in Q3.
The expanded relationship with Snowflake sees Alteryx added to the Snowflake marketplace.
“It lets the consumer go there and find rich data sets to compound their analytics and leverage the power of their Snowflake investment,” Huelskamp said. “AWS and Google are also strategic partners in the same way, because we have a strong Go-to-Market focus.”
Huelskamp said that Alteryx’s Go-to-Market strategy varies depending on the specific type of partner.
“With ISVs, we try to align where we have strength facing the customers, so our Go-to-Market with say AWS has strengthened in how we sell,” Huelskamp indicated. “With solution providers and GSIs, some are virtual members of our Go-To-Market, and others are ones where we co-sell together. Sometimes these are six-legged calls, with say us, a systems integrator, and Snowflake.”
Huelskamp said that changes to the partner program itself earlier this year have had a significant impact.
“The focus this year was on modernizing the program to include all partner types including OEMs,” she stated. “We added all new online training. The program now offers them increased benefits earlier, like for early opportunities. Combined with our partner-centric strategy, the investments we made are having a real impact.”
Huelskamp also emphasized that the analytics market is tapped less than 10% today.
“With us they can drive increased top lines and profitability to take advantage of this opportunity,” she said.
Looking ahead to the next year, Huelskamp said that the focus on the cloud will be even stronger.
“We have spent some time crafting where we will focus, and we will continue our emphasis on enablement in the cloud,” she stated. “We will focus on pipeline creation, in which we combine scalable repeatable practices with a partner and an ISV.
“Partners are excited about our new cloud solutions,” Huelskamp continued. “We are also bringing large scale training events out to the theatres – in the U.S., APJ and this month, EMEA. We are also becoming more involved in customized training. PWC in Canada had a significant new hire training. We were invited and could train them around analytics on our platform.”
