DigitalOcean, a developer cloud for app creation, on Tuesday launched its new Solutions Partner Program focused on serving SMBs.

The program targets two distinct types of partners: managed service and IT providers, cloud resellers and web development agencies that focus on selling DigitalOcean infrastructure along with their own services; and platform builders that develop their own technology solutions on top of DigitalOcean.

Jeff Giannetti, DigitalOcean’s chief customer officer, tells Channel Partners his company rolled out a pilot partner program in March alongside its Partner App Marketplace.

Digital Ocean’s Jeff Giannetti

“Today marks the official launch of the Solutions Partner Program with more than 400 partners around the world enrolled,” he said. “This offering, which allows companies to deploy, modernize and migrate their customers’ infrastructure, is uniquely tailored for SMBs, as DigitalOcean exists to serve this market’s need as cloud adoption rises (set to surpass $200 billion in 2019).”

Partners receive access to resources and content to help get their clients up and running, according to the company. They also are invited to join a partner community where they collaborate with other members and get direct access to experts from DigitalOcean’s sales, support and technical teams. This allows growing businesses, which may lack the technical capabilities or resources, to take full advantage of DigitalOcean’s knowledge base and expertise, it said.

“At DigitalOcean, we’ve always understood the value of working with partners — in fact, we had many customers already selling and servicing DigitalOcean on behalf of their customers,” Giannetti said. “However, we did not have a formal program in place to address their unique needs. Our strengths lie in simplicity and helping developers approach and assess problems, so our new program is a natural extension of those values for our partners and the customers they serve. We wanted to make it even easier for partners to work with DigitalOcean so they could focus on growing their businesses and on building amazing solutions on top of DigitalOcean infrastructure to serve their customers.”

DigitalOcean set an initial goal of enrolling 100 partners into its program, but the partner response “made it clear we would quickly surpass that goal,” he said.

“Our new program focuses on a segment of the market that has previously been overlooked – small and medium-size businesses,” Giannetti said. “Given our startup roots, DigitalOcean has a deep understanding of these businesses and has tailored the [partner program] to their needs. For example, partners focused on this segment have often run into challenges with transparency and flexibility when working with larger providers. To address these challenges, partners have access to resources like monthly webinars, Ask Me Anything sessions, and office hours hosted by DigitalOcean product managers. Our sales engineer teams also take an active role in helping our partners with migrations as they get started, no matter the partner’s size. Partners can also get their questions answered live in our dedicated partner slack group.”

Initial strategic partners include: Section.io, an edge computing platform; Red 5 Pro, a real-time video streaming platform; IncSub, a managed WordPress provider; Jet Server, a managed cloud provider; StablePoint, a fully managed cPanel web hosting service; and efelle Creative, a digital creative agency.

“By combining the power of our real-time video streaming platform with DigitalOcean’s proven developer cloud, we can enable customers of all sizes to scale to millions of concurrent viewers with less than 500 milliseconds of latency, all at a price point that fits their budgets,” said Chris Allen, Red 5 Pro‘s CEO.