‘7 Minutes’ with HyperGrid COO and Head of Alliances Mark Mitchell

… their workforce. HyperCloud delivers intelligent workload placement, which enables IT to make data-driven decisions for workload deployment based on performance, compliance and cost.

Finally, the Enterprise App Store has over 400 templates, which empowers developers and accelerates application development – and meeting line-of-business needs – while ensuring compliance with internal and external policies. IT can configure the usage and availability of certain templates to better control costs and automatically support compliance initiatives. It really simplifies the relationship between IT administrators and developers and changes IT’s role from bottleneck back to enabler of the business.

For MSPs, we empower and build their relationships and economic annuities with their customers and help them move from being a single-service provider to a cloud-service brokerage role across many public and private clouds. Many organizations sort of ended up with a multicloud strategy, and now they need the expertise to manage it. HyperCloud delivers real day-two value by making it easy for MSPs to on-board customers so they can manage their environments and also broker new services.

The App Store accelerates service creation and creates new revenue opportunities for our partner MSPs to stay ahead of their competitors. These services are deployed quickly and consistently across public and private clouds, creating new revenue streams fast.

Finally, MSPs increase margins on their services as management costs are greatly reduced with a simple, centralized and automated platform for management across clouds.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? Do you work with masters and/or distributors?

MM: We have a robust partner program with five primary tracks: MSPs, resellers. global SIs, technology partners and ISVs. We are open to all potential partners but are also selective because we want them to be successful.  At this point we don’t prefer one partner over another with metal designations.

You could say they are all platinum in our view.

We also take a “crawl, walk, run” approach with partners in that we work very closely with them early in the relationship, to make sure that they have the necessary training, business development tools and access to support and the like so that they get into the business confidently and successfully. The tools we use for enablement, of course, may vary depending on the particular partner’s needs and include regional business planning, cooperative selling and lead delivery, co-marketing and the more usual content assets, like online training, including, through HyperGrid University, use cases, white papers and case studies.

The myopic focus today is on helping our partners understand and then execute successfully using our HyperCloud platform. We do offer certifications through the training and HyperGrid University program, which is expanding rapidly. Typically, the early phase takes a few weeks with devoted partner effort, but over a fairly short time and with limited investment, they are well on their way to delivering the solution on their own.

The approach we take with partners is essential to our success. We believe and have built the model to truly support them. Take for example the MSP business. We truly enable them to deliver …