Today Aryaka, which delivers Unified SASE as a Service, is announcing the launch of a revamped channel program. The new Aryaka Partner Program provides additional simplicity, support, and structure to Aryaka’s growing distributor and VAR ecosystem. Aryaka is also announcing that Micheal McCollough, the global channel chief at Mimecast, will become a strategic advisor at Aryaka, while continuing to work in his role at Mimecast.
Aryaka overhauled their channel program and launched the Acclerate program in November 2021, making major changes like eliminating account protections, quotas and complicated channel integration approvals. That wasn’t that long ago, but there are good reasons why the program has been restructured again.
“We wanted to give some better structure and wanted to simplify it for our partners,” said Nick Alagna, Vice President of Global Channels at Aryaka. “We wanted to make it easier to onboard with us, and to build a profitable business with us.
“We also changed it to scale with the high growth we are seeing,” Alagna added. “We are seeing a lot of customers converging networking and security. As a company we have seen high growth as well, We have over 60 customers on our unified SASE platform. We just closed our fiscal Q1, and that was our best quarter in over a year and a half. Our partners are at the centre of all this and we have recruited over 30 new partners around the world and then signed TD SYNNEX as a North America anchor distributor in July, in a deal that was net new, and was to help us hit the fast forward button here in North America. They have been working over the last couple months to launch this, and it is now live.”
Alagna described the Aryaka channel as select rather than large.
‘We have in our trusted advisor or agent segment about 180 active agents, working under our TSDs [Tech Service distributors] and over 30 active reseller partners,” he indicated. “The majority of our business is North America, and over 80% of our business here goes through the channel. So we already have a very established channel, especially with our TSDs.” Aryaka has over 12 partners in Canada and over 25 customers in Canada.
The revamped program sees a major change in tiering.
“The old program had one tier, because the company wanted to expand its route to market and add additional VARs,” said Alagna, who came to Aryaka after these changes had been implemented. “We are now moving to a simplified two-level partner program. Our Entry level is Authorized partners and our Elite are the ones who invest in us, and we invest in them.”
Alagna noted that the major changes to the programmatic elements in the new program are based on the same principles Aryaka made previously in specific areas.
“We earlier brought in simplified pricing and packaging, and we paralleled that in this redesign of the program,” he said. “We offer very strong margins on closed one business [when a deal closes].
“We really centred everything around deal registration and protecting the partner that is bringing the opportunity to the table and is influencing the opportunity, Alagna emphasized. “So as a partner, if you are doing the work, we want to make sure we protect that and that the partner is in the driver’s seat with that deal registration.”
Major changes have also taken place with the SPIFF sales performance incentives for salespeople.
“We have very strong SPIFFS,” Alagna stated. “We have a global SPIFF, which varies a bit by region. It rewards closed one business for new logos. We will pay up to 2x of closing business in SPIFFs for new logos, which we believe is very attractive.”
MDF marketing development funds have also been restructured.
“We added some additional structure around MDF to help with marketing campaigns, demand generation, things like that,” Alagna said.
“We overhauled our training to simplify training and onboarding, and then we have a ‘sell with’ model where we are working with our partners across the entire sales process from lead generation to proof of concept,” Alagna added. “All the way to close one we are selling with our partners shoulder to shoulder.”
Another new component Aryaka calls ‘give to get.’
“This is centred around us establishing a two way street with our partners, where our elite partners bring opportunities to the table and we do as well,” Alagna said.
Changes are also being made to how certification works.
“We overhauled the sales component, and are still working on the technical component,” Alagna noted. “We’ve really overhauled how partners onboard with us. We simplified it, and made it more about – why Aryaka, our value prop and how they can deliver joint value to our customers. And we are making t really easy for them to get up to speed so they can start that ‘sell with’ motion with us.”
The emphasis here is on the Elite partners looking to invest with Aryaka, but Alagna also said its really more on an opportunity basis
“And then the final aspect is flexibility around services, so depending on what services a partner can offer customers, we can meet them there,” he stated. “We can do a fully managed version where we do it all, we can do a co-managed version where the partner takes on certain aspects and we take on certain aspects, or there can be a full self-service version by the partner.
“We want to make sure the Elite partners investing in us are rewarded and have that white glove kind of treatment from us. Really good Elite partners will have access to our executives, and will be able to talk to our product leadership, and influence our product road map.”
Alagna summed up the overall channel strategy in the revamped program.
“We are a partner led GTM, where over 80% of our business is channel and that’s growing,” he said. “We are in recruitment mode – but very focused on partners who will invest with us.”
The other component of today’s news is that Aryaka has added Mimecast Senior Vice President of Channels and Alliances Micheal McCollough as a strategic advisor. Before joining Mimecast, the experienced McCollough led Global Channels at Anomali, Imperva, and Akamai Technologies.
He is currently at Mimecast as their global channel chief, and is staying there, which is why he is a strategic advisor and not coming on board,” Alagna said, “His hire speaks to our continued investment in the channel and what we need to do to move the channel forward rapidly. As a strategic advisor, he helps us with overall channel strategy and helps us recruit partners.”