Monday Morning Impact – December 28

Interactive Intelligence Launches Enhanced Partner Program

Interactive Intelligence, an Indianapolis-based provider of software and cloud services for customer engagement, unified communications and collaboration, has launched an enhanced global partner program intended to support ease of doing business and provide new mechanisms to meet the needs of system integrators and carriers through formalized programs for each group.

The new SI program focuses on consultative and industry-specific skills necessary for large deployments. Interactive Intelligence has signed Accenture as its first SI under the new program. Meanwhile, the new Telco/Carrier program provides the opportunity for the company’s PureCloud services to be bundled with their voice services. Telcos/carriers can also offer deployment services and premium support, and are given resources to support customization and integration.

“As we’ve expanded our product offering and global footprint, we realized that we needed to both streamline partner engagement and diversify our partner ecosystem,” said Darren Gill, Interactive Intelligence vice president of channels. “The changes we’ve made are designed to better support our existing contact center-focused partners, while more quickly bringing to market our new cloud offering and building out our services business to reach new customers.”

Interactive Intelligence is also developing a solutions marketplace to support the marketing of complementary software and cloud services.

Channel Impact
As companies begin to establish market momentum, they also experience growing needs for updated, more full-featured channel programs. This announcement suggests the company’s management sees themselves at this juncture.

Accenture and Adobe Expand Digital Marketing Alliance

Accenture and Adobe announced the expansion of their global alliance to create and deliver digital marketing solutions for life science, healthcare, and financial services organizations in North America and Europe. Under a new three-year agreement, Accenture and Adobe will develop technology services and solutions designed to help customers in these vertical markets drive greater marketing performance and efficiency.

The two companies intend to establish a dedicated team with industry and digital marketing experience, sales personnel, and developers to integrate Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions with digital marketing services from Accenture Interactive, and apply Accenture’s knowledge of the life science, healthcare, and financial services industries. Accenture will also invest in growing its Adobe practice to deliver digital marketing solutions to clients at scale.

The offerings will initially become available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Channel Impact
The initiative should accelerate the deployment of digital marketing solutions in these targeted verticals with the support of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe’s enterprise software platform designed to help companies use big data to aim customized marketing to end users across multiple devices and digital touch points.

Avnet Names Its First Chief Information Security Officer

Phoenix –based Avnet, Inc. has named Sean Valcamp to the company’s newly created role of chief information security officer (CISO). Valcamp will be responsible for Avnet’s global IT security in addition to enterprise architecture and strategic planning for IT. In this role, he will report to Steve Phillips, Avnet’s chief information officer.

“Our position at the heart of the technology supply chain means information security is a critical focus area for Avnet,” said Phillips. “Sean’s appointment as Avnet’s CISO is one of several ways that we are demonstrating our continued commitment to protecting our information assets, as well as those entrusted to us by our employees, customers and partners. Sean’s expertise, track record, and breadth of experience across the information technology landscape means he is ideally qualified for this role.”

Valcamp has more than 25 years of IT experience in the areas of IT security, technology strategy, enterprise architecture and solutions development, including 16 years at Avnet.

Channel Impact
Valcamp has been instrumental in a number of key security projects at Avnet. The addition of a CISO underscores the distributor’s recognition of the criticality of IT security.