Array Networks on Tuesday announced the AVX Sales Accelerator Program (ASAP), a new partner program to help MSPs and VARs migrate their business from legacy networking and security appliances to Array’s AVX hyperconverged network functions platforms. 

Array Networks’ AVX was designed from the ground up to provide a purposeful virtual environment for networking and security. The appliances provide hardware-like performance in a virtualized environment with guaranteed SLAs that are simple and scalable, without costs spiraling out of control, the vendor said. 

“ASAP is for partners, more so for the MSP partner, who is looking to become a services outfit versus a traditional box-pusher type of reseller,” Paul Andersen, global vice president for marketing and sales with Array Networks, told us. “There are a lot of partners who want to go in this direction and they know that we have a box that can help them, but there’s a gap. They need help going from being a box pusher to being more of a managed service provider or cloud infrastructure service provider.” The vendor still runs A-Team, a more traditional partner program. 

Paul Andersen

Paul Andersen

ASAP is designed to close the gap and offers financial, technical and business-development components. 

The financial component is an operating lease program. It’s a three-year operating lease, paid monthly or quarterly — and fully paid at by the end of the lease.

“It allows the people who want to move into this program, less of a financial barrier to make it work,” Michael Stewart, director of the AVX technology team at Array Networks, told Channel Futures. “And, we can show the definitive ROI.” 

Array Networks’ AVX platform comes in small, medium and large configurations, that are priced accordingly. 

The technical support component bundles technical training and professional services into the three-year operating lease.

“The reason for this [is that] even though our partners may be smart, they don’t know the new platform or all of the things to field support calls, but we do, so we bundled that in,” said Stewart. 

Michael Stewart

Michael Stewart

The professional services help train the partners both technically as well as on a sales level, which Stewart says is particularly challenging for partners more familiar with moving hardware.

“You have to go after services in a different way; you have to be more flexible with what your customer wants versus what you can sell them. There’s also a conversation challenge that you need to have with your sales organization to help get them on board,” he said. 

The third component is business development, or joint marketing and sales campaigns. A key piece of the business development component is helping partners with customer leads.

“We’ve been doing joint marketing events with some partners, joint webinars to educate their customers as to what they can do, mailings … all of the practical marketing activities,” said Stewart. 

Partners also get an interactive customer portal, there’s sales training and certifications, as well as lead generation. 

ASAP was put in place to help remove barriers to entry for MSPs. And the vendor says it’s key that partners understand that AVX is a vendor-agnostic platform.

“We’d love everyone to run our products on AVX, but we’re not against someone running F5, Fortinet, [and so on]. What is important is that the partner or MSP meet the customers’ needs and not shove a product down their throat,” said Stewart. 

The company is reaching out to its existing partner base and is also open to new MSP partners. The ASAP program is available in North America with plans for program expansion to other locations.