**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a new feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Channel Partners met Datadog at the recent OpenStack Summit and got a sneak peek at its new channel strategy. Today, the SaaS-based data analytics platform provider goes public with its hire of John Gray as SVP of alliances. Gray, who was most recently at New Relic and has done stints at Oracle and BEA Systems, will lead the company’s channel partnerships business.

It also unveiled updates for MSPs and VARs, including multitenant capabilities that will enable partners to easily manage multiple accounts and the ability to grant read-only access, enabling more users to take advantage of data insights without risking accidental deletion or changes.

On the service front, the company recently announced Datadog APM, extending code-level visibility for DevOps teams concerned with service-oriented applications. Earlier this month it expanded its support for Microsoft Azure with a new integration for monitoring Azure Storage. Current customers include Airbnb, Netflix, Salesforce and other large enterprises that need unified full-stack monitoring of cloud-scale applications, including servers, databases and services. However, senior PR manager Adam LaGreca told us the product is granularly priced to appeal to smaller companies that may not have been able to afford the cost – not to mention care and feeding – of a packaged application performance management suite.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?{ad}

Adam LaGreca: Datadog is a full-suite monitoring platform for infrastructure and applications. We’re loved and adopted by companies ranging from Silicon Valley startups that are on the cutting-edge of tech, all the way up the food chain to the Fortune 500 as they migrate more of their workloads into the cloud. Simply put: We help companies optimize the performance and uptime of their websites and applications, which in today’s world is vital to success and scale. We have many secret sauces, but our ability to tag, track, and alert on highly dynamic cloud infrastructure is one of the components of our platform that sets us apart.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

AL: Our channel program is all about empowering and enabling our partners. We are attracting service providers, SIs, digital agencies, resellers, cloud platform partners and integration partners from all regions globally. Partners are looking for the ability to (i) migrate customers and (ii) accelerate workloads in the cloud. We plan to have several announcements enhancing the Datadog Partner Program in 2017, in order to help our partners recruit, enable, deploy, grow revenue and …

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… generate success for their customers.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

AL: We don’t reveal those numbers publicly. What I can say is that it’s scaling quickly! We currently integrate with over 200+ technologies, and we’re always looking for ways to partner up and help the overall channel ecosystem.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

AL: Our main competitors are legacy solutions that have been around for decades and that still service some of the largest companies in the world. However, as these companies migrate more of their workloads and applications into the cloud, they need a modern monitoring platform, and they turn to Datadog.

We also “compete” with home-brewed open-source monitoring solutions, for engineering teams that choose to spend their time and energy building and maintaining them. However, as companies scale, that becomes more difficult — most would rather use Datadog and spend their engineering resources elsewhere.{ad}

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

AL:  Customers will continue to expand from both ends of the spectrum, as cloud usage becomes even more ubiquitous than it is today. We’ll continue to add cloud-native companies like Airbnb and Twilio, while servicing more departments within banks and government agencies as they become more comfortable with all things cloud. That means we need to build out solutions and integrations that cater to a broad range of use cases.

We pride ourselves in being an engineering-driven organization with a deep connection with our community. For example, we recently released our widely read Docker Adoption Report, which shows how heavily containers are being leveraged in the enterprise; built out an integration to Kubernetes before many other monitoring vendors; and can monitor Microsoft Azure cloud environments more deeply than any of our competitors. While it’s tough to say what our technology portfolio will look like specifically three years into the future, we pride ourselves in being ahead of the curve when it comes to technology adoption and expect that trend to continue.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that timeframe?

AL: We just hired a new SVP of Alliances who is an industry veteran, previously from Oracle and New Relic. His name is John Gray, and he has big plans for our Datadog Partner Program in 2017.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

AL: We work with a variety of partners and are always open to discussions with potential partners. If you’re thinking about Datadog, or unsure of how we might work for you specifically, please reach out to us and get a conversation started: [email protected].

Follow editor in chief @LornaGarey on Twitter.