Monday Morning Impact – November 12

Cisco Rolls Out New Express Specialization Track for SMB

Cisco has added to its family of specializations, adding a new express specialization designed for partners targeting the SMB segment. The new designation is intended to foster a deeper knowledge of the San Jose-based company’s key solutions that best fit the needs of SMB customers, such as collaboration, security, networking (on-premise and cloud), and data center.

Cisco has long been an advocate of both technology-based specializations and market-based specializations, both of which provide definitive metrics that can be used in place of volume to determine discount levels and access to other rewards.

The new express specialization for SMB runs parallel to that strategy, promoting partners’ segment-specific capabilities, and validating the cross-architecture expertise needed by customers.

Benefits include access to discounts, rebates, and rewards; new software and service opportunities; a specialization logo for promotional purposes; and access SMB selling playbook, sales kits, and other partner resources.

Partners can complete one express specialization track to become a Select Certified partner.

Channel Impact^®
As an SMB Specialized partner, channel organizations can promote their validated competency in addressing the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses, and potentially foster long-lasting customer relationships that can lead to new and recurring revenues.

Ingram Micro and CenturyLink Partner for Hybrid Solutions

As part of an initiative to expand its hybrid solutions portfolio for SMB-focused MSPs, Ingram Micro Inc. has announced the development of a new private cloud solution. The new offering delivers a single-tenant hosted private cloud developed by CenturyLink, built on enterprise-grade technologies including VMware Cloud Foundation and HPE Gen 10 Proliant highly secure servers with Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

“We’re excited to expand our portfolio of hybrid solutions and continue to make secure private cloud solutions easily accessible and affordable for our channel partners and their customers,” says Tim Ament, senior vice president of Ingram Micro U.S. “The future is hybrid, and Ingram Micro’s cloud services portfolio offers the best of both private and public cloud solutions.”

The solution is managed through a single interface that enables MSPs to deploy, expand and manage their clients’ virtual machines, networking and applications. As a customer’s business grows, the solution can be scaled upward through the addition of integrated servers.

“More and more customers are seeking secure hybrid solutions that allow them to manage on-premise/off-premise IT assets seamlessly,” says Lisa Miller, president of Wholesale, Indirect Channels and Alliances at CenturyLink. “While infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provides the cost efficiency and scalability of cloud, many businesses want—and need—the physical data separation of a hosted private cloud, ensuring secure, siloed data and applications with the ease of on-premise access.”

Channel Impact^®
Amid rapid growth of hybrid technologies, this offering is designed to deliver a private cloud-based solution with greater flexibility, cost savings, efficiency, and security.

Turbonomic Issues Cloud Specialization for Azure And AWS Partners

Turbonomic, a Boston-based workload automation vendor for hybrid clouds, has updated its partner program to better meet the needs of global partners of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new cloud specialization is expected to offer partners a differentiated technology and approach to managing workload diversity across multiple customer environments in a single platform.

Partners who achieve the specialization gain access to dedicated technical resources to assist with first engagements, co-brandable customer campaigns, and service delivery templates. Additional training and enablement is also provided.

“Managing workloads in the cloud requires accurate planning and ongoing optimization,” said Chris Sullivan, Turbonomic’s senior vice president of global channels & alliances. “Partners can differentiate their offerings by leveraging a single management platform that runs across hybrid environments to deliver workload performance, policy adherence and cost-effectiveness to realize the full promise of cloud agility and elasticity.”

Meanwhile, Turbonomic is in the process of expanding its global partner/alliances team by the end of the year. The majority of hiring has been focused on Europe. The company claims more than 300 global alliance and channel partners. More than 30 partners have been onboarded and enabled through the new specialization.

Channel Impact^®
The new initiative is intended to help partners deliver fast and accurate, AI-powered cloud assessment plans and optimization, thereby providing new service opportunities and profit growth.