Starburst, the data access and analytics provider, has rolled out its first partner program for consulting partners, technology partners and resellers.

Starburst Orbit is a flexible membership program that gives partners multiple options to engage with the company and its customers. Partners can both add and extract value from Starburst Enterprise for Presto, a distributed data query engine.

Partners Critical to Customer Success

Harrison Johnson is head of partnerships at Starburst. He said Starburst has focused on building its partner community since early 2019.

“But this is the first partner program,” he said. “And it was designed to create a robust ecosystem to help companies make better decisions faster on all data. We’re excited to kick it off as we see our partner ecosystem as critical to making our customers successful.”

Starburst Orbit allows partners to help companies unlock the potential of all of their data regardless of its location. Customers can then make more comprehensive decisions that will impact revenue, customer engagement and overall strategy.

Starburst’s Harrison Johnson

“The addition of the program will help provide clear direction on how to partner with Starburst,” Harrison said. “It makes our intentions clear that building an ecosystem-centric business is our top priority.”

In addition to commercial incentives, the program offers marketing, technical enablement and product collaboration.

Starburst’s software touches a lot of IT and business operations solutions, Johnson said. Those include cloud and on-premises systems, data sources, data analysis tools and data consumers like data analysts, engineers, scientists and others.

About 30% of Starburst’s customer engagements are via partners, either as a referral or resale deal, Johnson said.

“The goal with Starburst Orbit is to boost that to 50% or more within two years, hopefully by the end of next year,” he said. “Ultimately, we want to push partner involvement to well over 50% of our active opportunities and customer engagements.”

Partner Feedback

Starburst collected feedback from many founding Orbit partners, Johnson said.

“We also sought guidance from several of the other major players in our space to try and build on their lessons learned to our initial launch,” he said.

The goal is to provide a simple program that makes it easy for partners to work with the Starburst team and their customers. Starburst has experienced “tremendous” growth with its SQL-based analytics acceleration engine, Johnson said.

“As organizations look to transform and develop a modern culture of data, Slalom is focused on helping them achieve new levels of velocity and become insights-driven businesses,” said Greg Taylor, Southwest regional delivery team director at Slalom. “With Starburst, Slalom is rapidly helping our clients scale their data fabric through a single source of access for analytics across the enterprise.”