Cradlepoint Channel Executive Pumped About Wireless WAN

Earlier this month, Cradlepoint channel executive Eric Purcell announced a major overhaul of the company’s partner program. The program redo came on the heels of the vendor announcing aggressive European expansion plans. These plans and channel investments signal new opportunities for Cradlepoint partners.

Almost all of Cradlepoint revenue and enterprise business goes through partners.

Cradlepoint’s Eric Purcell

With big undertakings afoot at the provider of network edge products and services, Channel Futures met with Purcell, senior vice president of global partner sales ad technology alliances, to discuss the company’s strategy and the role for partners.

Channel Futures: Cradlepoint just announced a significant global partner program overhaul and expansion plans. What’s up at the company?

Eric Purcell: Taking a step back, Cradlepoint is a leader in the delivery of 4G, and soon to be 5G, wireless networking solutions. We have intelligent endpoint in the router. But these routers are purpose built for branches, for the back of vehicles, such as first responders — police, fire trucks, mass transit have a Cradlepoint device for mobile. So we design specific devices for mobile and also, endpoints designed for IoT solutions.

That’s managed by our NetCloud service. The special sauce for Cradlepoint is our knowledge for wireless – 4G, LTE, and 5G – that differentiates our solutions.

From a company perspective, we have over 600 employees and we’ve been growing about 30% year over year. We’re growing globally and we added a new leader in Canada, another in EMEA, and make investments in Asia Pacific.

CF: So why now for the investments and overhaul of the partner program?

EP: It’s the timing in the marketplace — the adoption and market opportunity around wireless. We have a saying that everything that can be wireless will be wireless. There’s hockey stick growth around the use cases of mobile. And the current environment, as unfortunate as it is, has accelerated a lot of those use cases.

We also are aligned and have strong relationships with the global carriers. A lot of the solutions we deliver with Cradlepoint channel partners are available today over 4G as well as gigabit LTE, and parallels the turnup of 5G around the globe.

With the turnup of 5G networks, both public and private LTE, it’s coming together as a perfect opportunity to accelerate the go-to-market with our partners.

CF: What about the expansion overseas?

EP: We brought on James Bristow in EMEA. He’s continuing to ramp up and bring on new team members to expand our partners Europe. Another investment, we highlighted a bit last year is that we onboarded a new distributor, Tech Data, in Australia. So, we have additional resources to support our partners in APAC as well. And we’re hosting our first APAC Partner Summit …