Most Popular Partner program
It is an absolute necessity for every corporate to build alliances to thrive in the business ecosystem. Corporates are always looking for expanding their Partner base to increase their business to address a $1 trillion addressable market in the next 2 years.
A Partner program enables the partners to be innovative and to have capabilities for business model innovation that can extend across the geography. Partner programs vary from company to company, based on their size, volume and expertise. Corporates are spending billions of dollars to grow the partner business annually by giving direct access to all the critical business tools and information they would need to do business with their customers and partners.
Certain corporates follow their Global agenda and some customize the need and demand in the country by embracing partnership and collaboration strategy for its development. Most of the corporates expect its partners to be innovative and to have capabilities for business model innovation that extend beyond a service provider scope. They can then leverage partner’s competencies and resources to deliver its business transformation goals. The fact is partners are the significant contributor to the company's revenue.
We can’t deny the fact that innovative partner programs help create solutions and services to transform industries, markets, and lives. At the same time, many corporates want partners to be innovative in their thought processes and then evaluate on the potential partner’s certifications and benchmarks.
Rajeev Gupta
Director channels, India & SAARC, Sophos
“Our channel partner programs define the way we conduct business keeping them at the center of our business strategy. Our simple, profitable and flexible partner programs help our partners to grow their businesses by providing solutions that are easy to demonstrate, easy to sell, and easy to manage. Our dedicated channel team is always there to offer unparalleled customer support and satisfaction. From deal protection, competitive discounts, ready-to-use lead generation programs, world-class sales tools and training, we offer programs that help our channel partners maximize their revenue.
That said, our award-winning solutions are great on their own, but even better as a system. They have an unbeatable competitive advantage leading to an increase in customer retention. Additionally, our sales strategy is 100% “channel first” and as a result of considerable investment, we now have more than 39,000 global partners.”
Joybrata Mukherjee
Director - Channel, SI, Alliances and Service Providers
HPE India
“Our core value of “Partnership first” is our mantra of our partners being at the heart of HPE. We are a channel-focused organization committed to innovating new, collaborative solutions that enable growth for the company and our partners. Today, we are better positioned than any other vendor in the market to achieve this because our solutions are powering the seismic enterprise IT shift taking place worldwide. Moreover, we remain committed to delivering the value, resources and expertise partners have come to trust and expect from our company. Globally, we have over 110,000 channel partners. Our partner advisory council has 20 partners and are closely involved with us in developing geographic specific strategies.
As the most predictable, profitable, and leading program in the industry, HPE Partner Ready is the single HPE global program for partners, that provides enablement resources, incentives and tools to drive revenue growth and partner investment.
Last year, we announced key changes to HPE Partner Ready program to reflect emerging market trends while based on the same core principles. The enhancements to the program were designed to enable channel partners take advantage of the transitions in the market by enabling and rewarding them for investing in and driving growth across Hybrid IT product and services portfolio. Moreover, as we recognized the shift by customers to consumption-based financial models, we introduced a new competency in the HPE Partner Ready Program for HPE GreenLake, our suite of pay-per-use on-premises IT solutions, as well as a robust rebate that rewards HPE Partner Ready for Services partners for their capabilities with consumption-based models.
To help partners adapt to the realities of building pipeline in today’s digital world, we also offer the HPE Partner Ready Digital Marketing Program. The program provides a suite of marketing offerings including resources, tools, content, campaigns, and education that enable partners to increase their digital marketing proficiency, better connect with customers, and increase their pipeline and revenue. The program unifies all HPE digital marketing assets for partners under one program to make it easier and faster for partners to consume, access and leverage those assets to drive growth.”
Navneet Sah
National Channel Manager – India
RSA – a Dell technologies business
“The RSA SecurWorld Partner Program is designed for a mutually profitable relationship. The program has three tiers, each with their own requirements and benefits. The more committed one is to RSA, the higher is their tier and the greater the benefits.
There are 3 RSA SecurWorld partner tiers:
1. RSA SecurWorld Gold Partner – Entry level tier primarily consisting of VARs who manage authentication businesses.
2. RSA SecurWorld Platinum Partner – Mid-level tier who specialise and focus on a few RSA products but are heavily invested in them.
3. RSA SecurWorld Titanium Partner – Top level tier who have strategic focus on RSA products and solutions and are heavily invested in RSA through training and professional services.
Program Benefits:
RSA’s Deal Registration program provides upfront product discounts to partners who engage with customers early on in the sales cycle and deliver incremental business to RSA through new customers and/or new projects. Partners holding approved deal registrations will be the sole partner eligible to receive any further cost relief.
All SecurWorld partners receive access to RSA Partner Central, the hub for all program and product information. It is the place to submit deal registrations, access training, and download a variety of sales resources.
The RSA Rewards Program offers additional opportunities for partners to earn margin for finding, developing and closing net new sales opportunities. It provides an additional backend rebate tied to a percentage of closed, incremental business.
All partners have access to marketing development funds by request and Titanium level partners accrue co-op funds quarterly as a percentage of all eligible products they sell. They can use these funds to support activities such as training, demand generation, demo equipment, or RSA-dedicated headcount.
RSA offers a comprehensive accreditation program for VARs, enabling them to specialize in the solutions that best align to their skillset and GTM initiatives. Most of the training is online to minimize time out of the field, but also includes in-person workshops at the more advanced levels for additional hands-on training.
RSA offers a broad array of marketing tools and resources to help generate demand and promote solutions to customers in the most effective way possible.”
Shibu Paul
Vice President – International Sales
Array Networks
“The Channel is witnessing a gradual transition from the traditional asset model to an asset less model driven by cloud technology. Solutions like AI & ML are becoming more relevant to business. In such a scenario, our strategy is to empower our partners by offering solutions on our patented Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) in Networking & Security platform. Our mantra is to work with handpicked channel partners, train them and help them to create sustainable and profitable business models. We have designed our channel program in such a way that partners get protected margins as well as a wide degree of space in pricing to their customers. With the help of our dedicated channel ecosystem, we are focused on developing a skilled pool of resources. Moreover we will be investing in training and certifying our partners as well as joining customer engagement programs. In order to ensure that channel partners are rewarded for all their efforts, we will be assuring maximum margins in all Array deals.
Our strategy is to offer compelling hyper converged solutions in the area of Networking and Security including ADC,WAF,WVS,DDoS,IPS, NGFW. Our focus will be on customization rather than just offering standard product. For this we have set up Array Center for Technology and Innovation (ACTI) in Bangalore. ACTI features state-of-the-art technology and has a fully equipped customer training center capable of providing enhanced support to local and global stakeholders.
Blockchain, AI & Machine learning (ML) has huge potential to transform many products and services in the market place. Channel will play a vital role in implementing Blockchain, but first partners must educate themselves about the technology to further help the customers. Traditional HW /SW /Resell models are short term and are deemed as quickly declining markets. In such a scenario the focal point for Channel partners should be the end-client’s product, solutions and competition. Therefore a shift is partner approach is desired which requires them to innovate and include new and emerging technologies into their existing solutions.”
Neeraj Bhatia
Director - Partner, Alliances & Commercial Sales
Red Hat India & South India
“Partner programs are an integral part of business strategies to grow in unfamiliar and new territories, tap new customers or sell additional products and services. At Red Hat, our success is closely tied to the success of our partners.
Our partner program, Red Hat Connect, supports the evolving needs of our partners - so we can share in both collaboration and success. The Red Hat Connect is a 2-pillar partner program, consisting of Red Hat Connect for Technology Partners and Red Hat Connect for Business Partners. The first is focused on providing partners early access to technology and enabling certifications and the second is focused on go-to-market activities. We identify partners depending on their contractual relationship with Red Hat. Our program offers a flexible structure designed to accommodate our partners’ individual business models while also providing them access to a variety of benefits that help develop our partners expertise and increase their capability to sell and deliver Red Hat technologies.
We also recently launched the OpenShift Practice Builder Program for SIs in Asia Pacific. This program is uniquely designed to help SIs build expertise on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware developer tools and enable them to build and modernize applications for the cloud, to help deliver new services at lower cost and accelerate development for faster return on investment. At Red Hat, we always measure ourselves based on our partners’ success.
In 2019, we will continue to support our partners. For instance, we plan to up-skill our partners and build programs that are designed to enable them to take advantage of the opportunity to help enterprises and governments in India accelerate innovation through more agile IT infrastructure and applications. This can also enable partners to differentiate themselves in a saturated market of IT service providers. ”
Sundaresan Kanappan
Vice President and Country General Manager, India
Tech Data
“At Tech Data India, partner programs are core to our business strategy to encourage channel partners to recommend or sell the vendor's products and associated services.
The program provides Partners with the competitive advantage, enabling them to do more business with transformational solutions.
Through our Marketing services we help our vendors and partners generate leads that turn into sales. Targeting end users with dynamic marketing and lead-generation campaigns, events, outbound marketing, SEO are aimed at increasing visibility.
We also provide education & training tools and resources to assist you in building skills to sell and support solutions. Our goal is to help you solve complex training roadmaps, so you achieve higher levels of authorization and increase revenue.
Besides we provide a wide variety of vendor-specific and cross-platform technical support to help you provide end-to-end solutions for your end-user customers. Benefit from highly skilled, competitively priced assembly, configuration, customization, and installation of IT products.”
Dr. AS Prasad
General Manager – Product and Marketing
Vertiv India
“India is an extremely important market for us. With the on-going digital transformation, the region holds immense opportunities.
Our partners play a critical role in our go-to-market strategy and we look forward to growing and expanding this network across the country. We invest in educating our partners on technology applications and set a direction for them to approach prospective or existing customers. We are aligning and developing solutions to meet customers’ expectations and also enable our partners to be ready to take these developments to the customers. We offer ourpartners 360-degree support through the enhanced Vertiv Partner Portal, that includes easy access sales tools and other partner related information to help qualify and drive business growth, as well as access to the latest online and face-to-face training courses and partner-only events.
Last year, we changed our go-to market strategy from direct to channel. From being restricted to limited partners, our channel base has expanded. All our products are available through partners, bringing increased agility, decisiveness and investment capability.
Vertiv announced the launch of ‘Vertiv Xpress – Partner Drive’, a partner focused initiative to showcase our complete stack of critical infrastructure solutions. Launched in January, this multi-city initiative will engage partners through programmes and work on collectively growing the partner’s business. From our exhibit of 110 unique partners, 70 have been selected for this campaign and in total, 70 partner locations are considered to organize the partner driven events.”
Sunil Jose
Senior Vice President and Country Leader
Salesforce India
“Our partners are at the core of what we do and are critical to our customers’ success, and our growth strategy. Together we are enabling companies to innovate faster, make intelligent, data-driven decisions, and operate at scale. Salesforce created the first and biggest “born in the cloud” partner program, which has become a differentiator for Salesforce as customers are using the cloud to digitally transform. The Salesforce Partner Program offers a truly connected ecosystem approach. We have one connected partner ecosystem that collaborates to meet every changing need of our customers. Due to customer expectations, we continue to see a convergence of SIs and ISVs, as SIs invest in their own IP, creating solutions that can plug and play to meet customers’ transformation needs. The ecosystem includes global and regional consulting partners, digital agencies, ISVs, system integrators, and resellers focused on accelerating customer success.
In India, a significant portion of our new business was generated with our partners. The Salesforce Partner Community is a “one-stop shop” for education, enablement, and engagement. Most recently in India, we strengthened our association with Ingram Micro. Through this alliance, Ingram Micro will expand and foster the use of Salesforce’s market-leading sales, service marketing solutions and platform to businesses of all sizes across India, empowering them to deliver even greater customer success. One of the key values of our partner Ohana or extended family is trust. And this trust is built on transparency in the way we communicate with our partners. The goal of the Salesforce Partner Program is to help partners of all sizes grow and succeed.
Our partner ecosystem remains one of the most important pillars of our success, and we recognize the value that each of our consulting partners contributes to delivering the best customer experience in the industry. Ultimately we aim to satisfy the demand placed by our customers and ensure that Salesforce is a viable platform for our partners to build a business on.”
Vaibhav Kshatriya
Director, Channels & Services Sales
Avaya India
“Any business’s growth is linked to the growth of its partners, no matter which level they sit at. Avaya & Friends is an initiative to drive our global alliance programs through our open standards approach to business. Through the programs underneath the Avaya & Friends umbrella such as Avaya DevConnect, Avaya A.I.Connect, and the Avaya Innovation Partner Program, we are making highly advanced solutions available to channel partners, who can use them to propose innovative, vertical-specific technologies for their customers. We are making it easier than ever for our channel partners to grow their businesses and to position themselves as leading innovators.
Through Avaya & Friends, we are providing a path for channel partners to move from one value proposition to more advanced ones. Partners will be able to go from box-shifting to solution selling; from solution selling to innovation building; and from innovation building to enabling true business transformation.
A lot of vendors signed onto our technology partner programs are Avaya ‘Friends’. We are working with established and reputable partners such as Verint, Nuance and Sestek to offer conversational and cognitive AI solutions. NVT Phybridge is another important Friend – with this partnership, Avaya is able to make deploying Internet of Things solutions quick, easy and cost-effective.
For partners today, it’s a constant battle to keep ahead of the technology curve and innovation game. That’s the issue we’re addressing with Avaya & Friends. Our alliance programs result in industry-specific solutions that would normally be expensive and time-consuming to deploy."
Kalyan Deep Ray
Manager - Global Partners
CommScope, India & SAARC
“Our partners are ambassadors of our brand and trusted advisors of our technologies and solutions to our customers. One of our highest priorities is for our partner community to have the best-in-class workforce to provide services and consultation to our customers. It is just as important for our partners to add value to our products.
CommScope believes that strong collaboration between Partner, CommScope and customer sharing the goal of solving a problem, is the best way to bring CommScope solutions to the market. Our partners provide a voice for the customer that leads into our ever-growing innovation pipeline. That is why CommScope’s PartnerPRO Network is designed to help the channel manage new opportunities in today's competitive and challenging market.
Our PartnerPRO Network consists of consultants, integrators, installers, distributors and alliance partners trained and certified by CommScope to deliver the company’s broad range of network solutions. CommScope builds programs around our six Partner types to support our market solutions.
To keep up with the changing needs of how customers access the information and interact with partners, CommScope introduced the PartnerPRO Portal. This new portal is considered a collaboration software tool that pairs the needs of CommScope customers with our PartnerPRO Network members.
To empower our partners, CommScope has taken a number of steps, including offering partners training and certification through its market leading CommScope Infrastructure Academy, among other benefits.
With the growing partners’ network, it is not enough to just provide partners with innovative solutions and products that is why we also work with them on training to provide an even deeper level of value, in addition to helping them keep abreast of our latest offerings and industry setting standards.
With ARRIS and Ruckus Network joining CommScope, we are able to offer more value to our customers. Our diverse and capable 10,000+ partners support customers in more than 150 countries.”
Raghuram Krishnan
Director – Partner
Citrix India
“Globally, Citrix partners have delivered an incredible number of new Citrix Cloud customers and helped grow our cloud business by over 300 percent.
We expect this to be a great year for us and our channel partners as they will experience vast opportunities in growing their business with us. From a growth perspective, one of our key strategies is geographic expansion in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities, as this helps us take our offerings to the under-represented markets in the country. We are also looking to shift our focus towards significantly growing our addressable market with new offerings. Having recognized the constantly evolving and growing market, we also keep revamping our GTM and marketing strategy.
Additionally, in order to better address customer requirements, we have gone one step ahead and begun training our distributors. This enables them to reach the level where they can make end-customer calls along with their partners. We want to enable our partners to conduct business with customers, with minimal involvement from our team. We also maintain regular communication with our partners, so we can assist them wherever they need our support.
Along with our standard sales and pre-sales training that we conduct on a consistent basis, we also have 3 levels of certification for our partners – Silver, Gold and Platinum. Any partner who registers with us is a Silver partner, basis the specializations of the partner along with the revenue generated by the partner on an annual basis, the partners further get classified as Gold & Platinum partners with Platinum being the highest level of certification. We believe our partners play a crucial role in enabling our growth. Their industry knowledge and insight backed by technical expertise help us in effectively reaching out to our customers."
Ashish P. Dhakan
MD & CEO
Prama Hikvision India
“We have placed considerable emphasis on building our channel network in India through partner program in a focused and consistent manner over the years. Continually developing and growing our partnerships to meet evolving customer need across India, is the heart of our business. We are implementing a channel partner program to evangelize new technology trends, applications and products. It is time to reimagine partner program by understanding the changing dynamics of channel ecosystem. We are keenly observing the channel data at Micro and Macro level and is helping us to promote new products and technologies like Artificial Intelligence, AI Cloud, Deep Learning, Robotics and Machine Vision.
An effective partner program spurs growth of the channel so it remains the most important part of channel expansion strategy. At Hikvision, we value the partner program immensely as it provides the best for growth. It further helps in maintaining opportunities in legacy products while opening new revenue streams in emerging technologies and solutions.
The key factors that contribute for a successful partner program does not necessarily include the fringe benefits like rebates and front-end discounts. There is a strong need for alignment between capabilities, resources and vendor portfolio of the distributor to the targeted channel partners and their customers."
Harshavardhan Kathaley
Director - Partner Sales, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks
“The Juniper Partner Advantage (JPA) has evolved over the years in line with the evolution of the businesses triggered by advancements in technology and the way enterprises consume these technologies for delivering business results and improving their customer experiences.
Partner feedback has been put into practice in making improvements in the program design to address entire partnership lifecycle right from sign-up, enablement, sales acceleration, profitability, rewards & loyalty. A key objective has always been to provide new opportunities for partners in the areas of emerging technology use cases.
The key features of Juniper’s partner program are -
Simplified Requirements for partners
* India specific Sales Achievement (SA) thresholds
* Specialization at Elite and Select levels for more incentive opportunities
Modular Specializations – Flexibility for partners
* Partners choose from modular options based on a simplified core program that is tailored to their business model
* Focus on Enterprise Commercial, Security, Cloud & DC with flexibility to multi-specialize
Enriched Rewards Based on Partner Contribution
* Rebates focused on partner led business plus key specializations
Focus on Emerging Business Models
* Cloud, Software and Services focus to support partner’s migration to a recurring revenue model
GTM Coverage Options
* Alliance and Global SI Partner types to cover multi country requirements
* Elite and Select partners to cover in-country markets
* ‘Rising Star program’ for Elite and Select partners to provide ramp up period for development and investment.”
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