Monday Morning Impact – December 5

SAP Rolls Out Referral Option

SAP has announced the availability of its new PartnerEdge Cloud Choice, referral option. The option provides program members who refer SAP solutions and products to their clients, customers and contacts with finders fees, support and other benefits.

“As a key cloud player, our next frontier is aggressively going after the cloud opportunity with small and midsize companies,” said Rodolpho Cardenuto, president of global channels and general business at SAP. “The referral option focuses on empowering our current partners, as well as new partners, to grow their businesses and serve as trusted advisors while helping businesses solve today’s IT challenges.”

Open to any partner focused on the small and midsize market. Members can also leverage a specialized portal to manage their lead referral activities, review the status of their referrals and view their earned finder’s fees.

Channel Impact^®
As partners experiment with new business models and adopt new strategies, referral programs such as this one are likely to resonate with a subset of the partner base.

Morpheus Rolls Out Partner Program

Morpheus, a San Mateo, Calif.-based cloud application management company, has kicked off its new partner program.

The Morpheus cloud application management and orchestration platform is designed to give developers, IT managers, and DevOps professionals control over both VM and container-based systems across any cloud or infrastructure, providing complete application lifecycle management, provisioning, backup, recovery, logging, monitoring, reporting, and access control.

“Channel partners want more options to sell to their customers, and this is a great opportunity for them to expand their portfolio of solutions,” said Pete Beecher, President of Morpheus. “We’ve created an extensive partner program to ensure profitability and success for our partners, with dedicated resources for business planning, sales strategy, post-sales support and competitive intelligence. The program is a strategic imperative for Morpheus—our goal is to drive 100% of our sales through the channel.”

The Morpheus Partner Program focuses on three types of partners, including resellers, technology partners focused on combined solutions, and service providers bundling Morpheus into larger services offerings.

Various features have been built into the overall program, including market development funds, sales and technical certification, and demo software.

Channel Impact^®
Recognizing the various options for their go-to-market model, the company has built a program designed to fit their main constituents.

Presidio Moves Toward IPO

Presidio, Inc., a New York-based solutions provider, announced that it has filed initial paperwork with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. But many statements in the business press suggest the value could be as much as $3 billion.

J.P. Morgan and Citigroup are acting as joint book-running managers for the proposed initial public offering and representatives of the underwriters. Additional book-running managers are Barclays and RBC Capital Markets.

Presidio offers professional, managed, and support services including strategy, consulting, implementation and design to approximately 7,000 middle market, enterprise and government clients. The company reports $2.7 billion in annual revenue.

Channel Impact^®
Look for more large integrators to explore options around IPOs as the IT industry shifts to a service model that delivers more linear results.