CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — NetFortris (booth 1567) has relaunched its channel partner program with significant investments in channel leadership, support and systems.

The announcement was made at this week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo. The relaunch of the NetFortris Partner Program coincides with the release of the company’s new brand identity. It more closely reflects NetFortris’ business technology solutions, and its promise to deliver competitive advantage to partners and their customers.

The channel partner program now includes four partner tiers – platinum, diamond, gold and bronze – based on monthly recurring revenue (MRR). The new structure rewards partners with increasing benefits as they move up the tiers and grow their business with NetFortris.

More Partner Types

Jamie Minner is NetFortris’ chief revenue officer. He said Fortress previously didn’t have an overly organized channel partner program.

NetFortris’ Jamie Minner

“They had pieces of it and it was tailored to an individual partner,” he said. “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s build a program and put our partners in the program and help them mature through a process with us.’ We brought on marketing folks and we brought on sales operations. We are in the process of doubling our channel organization.”

NetFortris is going after more partners and wanted a more organized partner program for them, Minner said.

Each region is led by a regional vice president who oversees dedicated regional channel managers, strategic account managers, sales engineers, provisioning managers and a customer onboarding specialist. That’s to ensure consistent collaboration and communications between the NetFortris team, the selling partners and their customers.

“I have a close relationship with a lot of partners,” Minner said. “And so rather than just launch something that we thought would be relevant to the market, we did a partner roadshow and visited not just our key regional partners, but also a lot of the [technology solutions brokerages]. We gathered a lot of feedback from them. Some we used and some we didn’t because some of it was really kind of relative to that one partner. We tried to take that information as a whole and then put it into a program that we felt would benefit our partner community entirely, not just one or two people.”

Partner program benefits include market development funds, co-marketing campaigns, spiffs and more. In addition, partners have access to a new partner portal with sales and marketing resources.

MSP Rebrand

NetFortris has rebranded as an MSP, Minner said.

“In trying to move the market perception of NetFortris from being a network aggregator or the old Fonality, we wanted to make sure that the new brand spoke to innovation moving forward, forward thinking, and diversity is a big part of it, too. And then taking all of those products that we have and really becoming a nationwide MSP. It really helps a partner position NetFortris as an MSP that can do more than just UCaaS or more than just network. If you need it to be one or the other, we can do that as well. But at the end of the day, the customer can get in and grow with us or come in at the top and have all of our products.”

The newly released Fortress Secure Office delivers an integrated enterprise-grade tech stack to small businesses. The all-in-one solution gives partners an edge over their competitors and helps small businesses drive tech-enabled competitive advantage, the company said.