May’s Channel Program Changes

This month’s channel-program roundup includes two companies in the midst of a major channel transition: CenturyLink, which is looking for a new channel chief, and EMC, which is prepping for its future as a Dell-acquired company.

But that’s not all. As usual, our gallery features new channel programs from some companies you might not know, plus enhancements to programs that might already be in your wheelhouse.

This gallery doesn’t include every channel-program update in the past month, but it offers up a nice recap.

Missed April’s big channel changes? Find those here.

Follow senior online managing editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

PlanetOne Communications expanded its focus on cloud services with the addition of a dedicated Cloud Practice.

The new practice focuses on enabling preferred vendors, agents and MSPs to identify cloud-ready sales opportunities, “perfect the pitch, close the deal and blow the customer away with exceptional execution and ongoing service,” according to the company.

It came six months after the launch of the master agent’s Cloud 411 program, which offers a centralized, online education and resource center for its channel partners.

Want to know more about this change at PlanetOne? Go here.

CenturyLink’s new senior vice president of strategic partnerships and channel operations talked with Channel Partners about his newly created role at the company and the future of the CenturyLink Channel Alliance.

Channel chief Blake Wetzel resigned around the same time as Corbin’s hiring. That’s a position Corbin will be looking to fill.

“Am I going to change the partner program and channel strategy? It’s too soon to tell,” Corbin told us. “Any changes will be enhancements to the program, it will make it more attractive to the channel partners and SIs to do business with us, but it’s too new to tell where those changes might be or what those changes might be. Ask me in another three months.”

Click here to read our full Q&A with Bill Corbin.

RingCentral enhanced its professional services by adding a Certified Delivery Partner Program aimed at supporting global enterprise customers.

Certified delivery partners are based all over the world, providing support and fulfilling enterprise service requests – including technical design, implementation, network configuration, integration and monitoring services. Developed to scale, the program is customizable according to the level of professional-services capabilities and geographic reach an enterprise may need, the company said.

This is the place for the full details on RingCentral’s new program.

Salesforce unified its partner programs to more easily distinguish partners that consistently deliver under their respective tiers and enhance the customer experience.

Marketing Cloud resellers, referral partners and consulting partners are moving into the Salesforce Consulting Partner Program. Also, HubExchange partners are moving into the Salesforce ISV Partner Program and onto the AppExchange business apps marketplace.

Click here for the full story on what’s up at Salesforce.

Dell’s pending $70 billion acquisition of EMC, which is being called the biggest tech merger in history, has raised a number of questions regarding how the storage giant’s channel partners will be impacted.

“One of the ways partners look at this is there’s no company that has the breadth of portfolio or strength that we do as a group, so that’s certainly a positive factor,” said EMC CEO Joe Tucci, on stage at EMC’s Global Partner Summit last month in Las Vegas. “If you look at EMC partners or Dell partners, it’s not as if there are a lot of big ones that we are lacking. We want to go deeper with those partners that we already have. I think that’s a more important factor in our growth.”

The merger is expected to close later this year.

Our partner-focused story from EMC World can be found here.

Unify, the unified-communications provider recently acquired by Atos, the global MSP, made numerous improvements to its partner program to increase business through its global partner network.

Sophos announced a new MSP Connect program designed to make it simpler, and more profitable, for its partners to deliver a full slate of security.

Scott Barlow, Sophos’ vice president, global MSP, summed it up: “One security vendor, one management dashboard, one flexible program.”

Barlow, who came to Sophos with its 2015 acquisition of Reflexion and is responsible rolling out the new program, told Channel Partners that it’s about integration, synchronization and profitability.

Click here for much more on Sophos’ new MSP Connect program.

Private cloud startup ZeroStack launched a new global partner program to allow partners to deliver an “OpenStack cloud in a box” to their customers.

The program aims to enable resellers and channel partners to advance and accelerate adoption of the ZeroStack Cloud Platform. Based on OpenStack, the platform is an “ultra-converged cloud solution, which provides a software-driven private cloud that offers the ease-of-use of a public cloud, coupled with complete control and security,” according to the company.

More on ZeroStack is here.

Prevalent, which bills itself as a third-party risk and vendor threat intelligence provider, launched its first channel program with the intention of onboarding new partners.

The Prevalent Partner Program comprises a network of security and compliance reseller partners that can sell the company’s third-party risk services and have access to “decades of collective expertise in the third-party risk management space,” the company said.

Read more about the Prevalent Partner Program here.

Analytics provider Trifacta, which specializes in “data wrangling,” launched a global partner program aimed at supporting and enabling partners that are selling, implementing and innovating with the company.

The Wrangler Partner Program includes reseller, consulting and technology vendors in business intelligence (BI), Hadoop and relational data platforms, and cloud services. The goal is to promote the adoption of data wrangling within business departments and analytics teams.

Learn more about the Wrangler Partner Program here.

Platform9 announced its new partner program designed for resellers, service providers and systems integrators focused on cloud computing.

The program aims to help partners more efficiently design and deploy flexible, enterprise-ready OpenStack private clouds for their customers. It gives partners tools and resources to implement an on-premises private cloud.

Click here to learn more about Platform9’s new partner program.

Archive360, the aptly named email archive-migration software provider, announced its Accelerate Channel Program with incentives and tools to drive more adoption of Microsoft Office 365 and next-generation cloud-archive services.

The program offers a complete “migration in a box” service for partners that need to migrate customer data from aging archives into Office 365 and leading cloud archive providers, increasing potential revenues up to four times, according to Archive360.

Click here to learn more about the Accelerate Channel Program.