With our new partner-first model, we’re offering the easy button to a very large market opportunity
By Peter Scott
Nov 05, 2020
To be a successful technology company, you have to get a lot of things right, but two in particular are the quality of the product or service, and the revenue acceleration from a strong channel program.
And that’s why WANdisco this month has quite a bit to celebrate — we’ve just become a whole lot stronger. With an emphasis on both scale and strategy, WANdisco is shifting to a partner-first model, a move that will propel global expansion through the quality of our product and the deep power of our new, influential partners.
The global WANdisco LiveData Partner Network is part of a new partner first go-to-market strategy, which will rapidly enable consulting partners, system integrators and others to leverage a robust set of new sales, marketing, training, certification and support resources. Just another technology partner program? Not this one. We have had a laser focus on the needs of our partners from the start. Resoundingly, our partners told us they wanted the easy button. They asked for WANdisco to be easy to do business with--from our products to our PRM system. What binds us is a maniacal focus on delivering the best customer experience and time to value as a strategic part of our customers’ digital transformation.
Our partners have been, and continue to be, central to our success. WANdisco LiveData Migrator is now available through the Azure Marketplace as the first native Azure service, with all the features our partners and customers have grown accustomed to. We were also recently recognized as the preferred solution for Hadoop to Azure migrations. Similarly, WANdisco is an AWS Advanced migration partner, available in the AWS marketplace. We are the first ISV to achieve the Amazon migration competency from Hadoop to AWS. And our key SI partners have already begun integrating the WANdisco solution into their offerings, like Infosys Data Wizard that provides a rich graphical user interface-driven migration life cycle management solution.
By the way, it’s not our objective to sign up hundreds of partners. We want to work with the leading Cloud Service Providers, Systems Integrators and ISVs to unlock the $1.7 Billion cloud migration and replication opportunity as part of our customer’s data and application modernization efforts, which are in full swing today.
We want to work with the best and the brightest because--well, here’s the thing--moving big data is disruptive. You have to shut down applications while you move data from one location to the other and if the use case demands zero downtime or data loss while migrating and replicating data with a high rate of daily change, how do you know that it’s all there once you’ve moved it and you haven’t lost any of it? Legacy, manual migration approaches like Distributed Copy (DistCP) fall flat. We have seen many customers try this “free” approach first, often with catastrophic results. You see, any DistCP based technologies like Cloudera BDR, Azure Data Factory, Apache Nifi can’t keep up with a high rate of changing data.
At WANdisco, we’ve automated the process with LiveData Cloud Services and we’ve made the platform available for customers and partners to migrate big data in a self-service way without engineering teams, an army of consultants, and without the downtime and risks.
Our partner-first model will truly encapsulate what it means to be stronger than the sum of your parts. As Vice President at WANdisco, I’ve been through the company’s IPO in 2012 and also through the launch of a variety of OEM and strategic partnerships, including those with IBM and Alibaba Cloud. So while our partner program is new, our partner first go-to-market model and partnerships with key cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure and AWS have always been at the heart of our strategy.
With the LiveData Partner Network, WANdisco has created an elegant, effortless solution to the common stumbling block facing so many enterprises as they continue their march towards digital transformation. So often, big enterprises find that as they migrate analytical data to the cloud to reap the benefits of flexible, large scale computing and data storage, they are stymied by the same challenge: They want to migrate live, transaction data, but they can’t afford the risk of business downtime, data loss or significant migration project overruns. Problem solved.
Hadoop migration has definitely been a challenge in the past for those who have tried with manual approaches. On the other hand, many companies still have no idea how difficult this is. A big part of our shared sales and marketing efforts with our strategic partners is one of thought leadership and education. It’s a challenge that has helped root our passion for the cloud and its immense powers. And it’s a challenge we are excited to now help so many companies overcome with our partners.
We believe the LiveData Partner Network is the biggest growth driver for the company in 2021 and beyond, and will push WANdisco toward a quick expansion and global scale up. That’s exciting. We’ll be helping partners grow their own businesses, getting their share of the $20 billion and growing cloud analytics market while providing customers with the path to power their digital transformation, which is exactly the sort of process that we at WANdisco believe in.
So who is going to benefit from the LiveData Partner Network? This program meets the critical needs of cloud service providers, data platform providers, system integrators, OEM, or distribution/resell partners. It features a simple, three-tier achievement level system, providing opportunities to attain higher levels of partnership by meeting specified program requirements.
It all starts at the Registration Level, which is super simple and enables new partners to get started and rapidly onboarded with WANdisco. Then there’s the Solution Level, where partners wrap industry-leading solutions around WANdisco technology, providing an excellent customer experience and are committed to doing significant business with the company. Finally, Strategic Partners will demonstrate a proven track record and a very high degree of business synergy and deep expertise with WANdisco and have significant presence in multiple geographies.
Through the program, companies tap into a variety of intuitive self-paced training and enablement materials. The curriculum contains technical and sales-related courses, developed to help enhance knowledge, drive performance, and accelerate ROI with WANdisco technology and solutions.
And the marketing benefits are vast. They involve scalable programs and resources to support go-to-market initiatives and increase market exposure. There are also discretionary funds for select groups of partners to subsidize mutually beneficial market awareness and demand generation activities that cultivate the sourcing of new business.
We’ll also be providing business planning assistance, where partners work with assigned account managers to jointly develop quarterly business plans, and sales support including advice on the development of solutions, reducing time to market, and maximizing customer satisfaction.
Here at WANdisco, we’re all about being easy to do business with. It’s never been a better time to partner and join the LiveData Movement.
To learn more about the WANdisco LiveData Partner Network program, visit https://wandisco.com/partners
Read more about WANdisco’s new partner-first model in CRN’s article here
