With a year in the books since the launch of Hitachi Vantara, and five months into a brand new partner program, the company looks at the evolution of the channel changes that accompanied its own reinvention of itself, and what more remains to be done.
Square has built a big business around providing support to microsellers who were too small to interest credit card companies, or who found their services too expensive. While this market is still their core, they have moved upmarket as well, with larger sellers, assisted by strategic partnerships with companies like SAP. The new channel program is designed to support partners in this upmarket transition.
Meta Networks, whose network-as-a-service offering appeals to a variety of solution providers across the security, networking and managed services spaces, wants to start with a limited number of initial partners, and make them successful before expanding the program.
Recruitment of new MSP partners, in a business where the cloud is constantly increasing in importance, is a top priority for Arcserve.
Zebra sells its solutions predominantly to major verticals like retail and manufacturing, where most of their partners play, but for the first time they have announced a specialization for what will be a fairly small minority of partners with a deep focus in an area.
FileCloud has been selling their Enterprise File Sync and Sharing Solution mainly direct, and through larger MSPs who do their own hosting. However, they just launched a partner program for smaller MSPs looking to resell a service that FileCloud hosts, and are looking – selectively – for additional partners.
The Channel Charter – Nutanix’s new channel program – is designed to encourage partners to move beyond HCI to the cloud, while also allowing smarter partners who are deeply focused on Nutanix to qualify for the program’s top tier.
SAP launched this new component in their cloud strategy this March, and have already had 450 partner solutions qualified – with between 700 and 800 more in the pipeline.
Panasonic has made major changes to its product set and its channel go-to-market mechanisms in order to better expand in enterprise markets outside their rugged PC stronghold.
OneLogin, which has been focused more on cloud identity management for SMBs, has gotten more aggressive in the enterprise with the differentiating hybrid capabilities from its introduction of OneLogic Access earlier this year.
The new program significantly improves partner enablement, while looking to double down with key go-to-market partners and encourage joint solutions with SnapLogic Technology Partners. SnapLogic also wants to recruit some more partners in Canada.
HYCU brought a rudimentary channel program with them when they spun out of Comtrade Software earlier this year, but now they have essentially remade it, making changes to strongly align with what Nutanix is doing, and adding the kind of features channel partners expect.
Microsoft’s channel chief discusses the software giant’s plans to expand a program where Microsoft sells partners’ products and services, including hooking partners up to its AppSource store.
Commvault has greatly simplified its solution set, from 21 product areas to four, and consolidated its partner enablement tools, with the goal of both being to greatly scale the channel business.
Pax8 has introduced new Professional Services at partner request, both to perform services for MSPs who lack the necessary skills at a relatively low cost, and also to teach the MSPs how to repeat the service without assistance later.
Prime Unlimited is an optional flat rate per-user price for OpenText managed services, while Prime Protect is a standard support package for partners.
The changes involve restructuring the deployment of Lenovo resources to better support partners, new rewards for alignment and new logos, and changes to improve slow pricing policies – although a big one won’t roll out until next year.
Unitrends also promotes Clark Brown, who formerly managed their DMR relationships, to the channel chief role.
Dell EMC Canadian channel chief Deanna Thomson discusses the Canadian channel, and why its performance in Q1 was even better than overall Dell EMC numbers.
Montreal-based Accedian sold mainly direct and to service providers until their acquisition of a French company late last year. Now they can target the enterprise and midmarket, and will use a select channel to reach these new types of customers.
