Avaya partners at forefront of vendor's cloud transformation
According to Avaya, the business communications vendor will reward partners that help build out Avaya cloud business; other channel news from the week.
Avaya has expanded further into cloud-based communications, a market opportunity the vendor is enlisting Avaya partners to help capture.
At its Engage user conference, held this week in Austin, Texas, Avaya introduced a private cloud delivery model for its OneCloud unified communications as a service (UCaas) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) offerings. Avaya said the private cloud delivery model, called OneCloud ReadyNow, provides preconfigured, per seat consumption and standard bundles of the UCaaS and CCaaS products. ReadyNow adds to the cloud opportunities the vendor is extending to Avaya partners.
"When you look at Avaya, across the ecosystem, [Avaya] partners have continued to evolve with us. They have been at the forefront of our cloud transformation," said Gary Levy, vice president of Americas channel sales at Avaya, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.
In the U.S., Avaya derives about 65% of its business from channel partners, according to John Colvin, regional marketing director of the U.S., at Avaya. "From a growth perspective, it is inherently important for us to continue to invest in those partners [and] continue to grow those partners, because we can't grow our market share without them growing," Colvin said.
Avaya has been amid a recent update of its channel partner resources. Earlier this month, the vendor updated its Edge Channel Partner Program with a greater emphasis on Avaya cloud business. The vendor works with about 4,700 partners globally, Levy said.
"With cloud, we have really taken a different approach to bring all partners on par. ... We are going to reward those partners who have successful quarter-over-quarter growth with cloud," Levy said.
As part of the Avaya cloud expansion, he noted that Avaya has been engaging a variety of partner types, including master agents. "When it comes to cloud, we have been working tightly with many [in] the master agent community," he said.
Bitglass reports growing channel contribution
Bitglass, a cloud access security broker (CASB) vendor that signed its first channel partner in 2016, reported partners now contribute 72% of customer wins and half of its revenue.
The Campbell, Calif., company has 169 companies on its partner roster. The channel companies have helped propel Bitglass' revenue, which has grown more than 112% since its original channel foray three years ago. In addition, between November 2017 and November 2018, the CASB company experienced 45% channel growth and expects to see two to three times that rate in 2019.
Bill Ng, channel marketing manager at Bitglass, said he is seeing "a ton of partner interest."
He said partners have noted growing curiosity in CASB among their customers. Jacob Serpa, product marketing manager at Bitglass, said CASB products serve as the point of visibility and control for data as enterprises migrate to the cloud and enable personal device access via BYOD programs.
Bitglass works with partners such as distributors, resellers and systems integrators.
"We focus on partners who get security and also have customers who are moving to the cloud," Ng said.
Other news
- A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm based in Chicago, has acquired Cervello, a consulting company that offers managed services, data management consulting, custom applications development and cloud integration. Cervello has offices in Boston, New York, Dallas, London and Bengaluru, India.
- Amazon Athena, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Amazon MQ are the fastest growing AWS products and services, according to 2nd Watch, a managed services provider (MSP) based in Seattle. The company based its ranking on the money customers spent with 2nd Watch on AWS offerings in 2018 versus 2017. Following the top three products/services are AWS OpsWorks, Amazon EC2 Container Service, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Glue, Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Macie.
- Asigra Inc., a data protection cloud backup software provider based in Toronto, said it now offers an unlimited-use subscription license model to address the challenges MSPs face when trying to accurately forecast backup software licensing With the new licensing model, an MSP's pricing is "based on usage from the previous year, plus a jointly agreed upon growth commitment," according to Asigra.
- Information Builders, a business intelligence and analytics vendor based in New York, unveiled a new Global Partner Program for partners targeting the data and analytics market. The company said the program supports the OEM, reseller, referral and co-sell sales models, offering discounts, referral fees and deal registration geared to each partner environment.
- Kaspersky Lab unveiled Kaspersky United, a new global channel program. Partners can access education, sales and marketing toolkits, and a new incentives structure, the vendor said. The United program aims to help partners gain expertise in Kaspersky product categories or services, according to Kaspersky.
- Sparkhound, a company focusing on digital solutions and managed enterprise services, said it is working with Head Health Network to improve that company's network performance and its ability to collect and process helmet-impact data from college and high school football games. Sparkhound has set up a Microsoft Azure cloud service to support the processing of player collision data.
- Segment, a customer data infrastructure vendor, rolled out a partner program called Segment Select. Channel partner resources include training and certification, technical support and co-marketing opportunities, Segment said.
- NTT Data Corp., an IT services and solutions provider, has selected Exabeam, a security information and event management company, to secure its global operations. NTT Data will use Exabeam's Security Management Platform.
- Rackspace, a managed hosting and cloud computing services company based in San Antonio, said it will resell Synchronoss Technologies Inc.'s Synchronoss Digital Experience Platform.
- Managed detection and response provider eSentire said channel partners have full access to its new Managed Endpoint Defense offering. ESentire launched Managed Endpoint Defense this week in partnership with security vendor Carbon Black.
- Cloud communications vendor Twilio named Chetan Chaudhary as its global vice president of partners. Chaudhary will also continue to serve as general manager of Twilio's IoT business unit, the vendor said.
Market Share is news roundup published every Friday.
