Monday Morning Impact – March 23

By Ken Presti, Senior Consultant, Channel Impact

HP Rolls Out Multiple Partner Program Enhancements

HP has announced a number of adjustments to its channel program with an emphasis on helping partners remain successful amid changes at the industry level, as well as at the company level.

The HP Partner Navigator program is designed to help distributors and resellers maintain business continuity through HP’s separation into two separate entities. For HP’s largest, operationally complex direct partners, partner account operations managers will work directly with resourced Partner Navigators, who are named partner employees, to address each partner’s unique operational needs.

HP also announced the Partner One Alliance, designed to help top partners continue to offer cross-portfolio opportunities across companies after the separation. With the Partner One Alliance, both Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. will work together on partner activities and maximize participation in industry channel events. Dedicated teams in both companies will collaborate to build joint business and marketing plans around specific solutions in key areas of the portfolios. The Partner One Alliance will be available to all Platinum, Gold, Silver and distribution partners.

The new HP Helion Partner Marketplace is a public services cloud marketplace that enables resellers to easily and efficiently sell, provision, maintain and invoice a comprehensive suite of public cloud services for small and medium businesses. This is available now in the U.S. and will be available in EMEA and APJ later this year.

In addition, HP also announced new Mobility Sales Plays focused on key verticals and a Mobility Certification program to help partners capitalize on customers’ growing need for next-generation workforce productivity solutions.

Channel Impact
Whenever a large established vendor makes a major move (like breaking into multiple entities), fear from the channel is a practical certainty. The Partner Navigator program will likely go a long way towards helping partners understand and adjust to the changes. The cloud marketplace will help augment partners moving to the new business model while the Mobility Sales Plays will likely open doors to new market spaces for many partners.

Equinix Launches Global Channel Partner Program

Equinix, Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based interconnection and data center company, today announced the launch of its global channel partner program. The initiative is aimed at facilitating partners in either a platform, resale or referral model, particularly at the enterprise level where customers are choosing among public clouds, private clouds and traditional IT environments.

Program features include deal registration, MDF, and enablement with benefits and requirements scaling upwards as partner progress from the Bronze level upwards to Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

“Partners can sell our Cloud Exchange [cloud and network ecosystem] and our performance hub for WAN optimization,” said chief sales officer Pete Hayes. “We want to make sure that the same products that our direct teams are selling can be sold by our partners, as well. So it’s not just a matter of partners going out to resell colocation. If we’re selling it, you’re selling it. And if there’s anything we can do to help you sell it, let us know.”

The program officially launched last week, and has a roster of approximately 100 partners, so far.

“In addition to our offerings, partners can add value through system and network design, deployment, and management,” added channel vice president Christopher Rajiah. “It’s a great value proposition, and we are a very channel-friendly company.”

Equinix provides data centers in 33 markets across five continents.

Channel Impact
Equinix comes to the table with key services that can also be bundled into other offers to increase value to the customer, as well as to the channel. Such environments generally lead to strong opportunities for partner profitability.

RiverMeadow and Ingram Micro Finalize North American Distribution Agreement

Ingram Micro Cloud will add RiverMeadow SaaS to its cloud solution portfolio and provide distribution services through its network of North American channel partners.

RiverMeadow offers an automated cloud onboarding and workload mobility platform developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds. Supported platforms include VMware, Cisco, Oracle, AWS, HP Helion and OpenStack. Under terms of the agreement, RiverMeadow SaaS migration SKUs will be distributed in quantities of 50-packs and 250-packs. Additionally, RiverMeadow and Ingram Micro will collaborate on various IT channel focused marketing and sales enablement programs over the next 12 months.

“RiverMeadow provides Ingram Micro with a SKU on our product list that allows us to help our channel partners drive cloud adoption in the market while giving them an opportunity to quickly grow revenue for their cloud businesses.” said Michael Giambanco, director of cloud sales at Ingram Micro.

Channel Impact
Based in San Jose, Calif., privately-held RiverMeadow Software will find greatly enhanced access to channel partners through this alliance with Ingram Micro. Such access is often difficult to achieve for smaller companies.