**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of February’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

One day ahead of the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, where it will be exhibiting in booth #345, Equinix launched enhancements to its global Channel Partner Program aimed at building on its 2015 momentum and providing additional revenue opportunities for its partners.

Newly launched training and certification programs will enable partners to develop a stronger joint value proposition with Equinix as enterprise customers explore interconnection, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, according to the company.

Christopher Rajiah, Equinix’s vice president of worldwide channel sales and alliances, tells Channel Partners that, acknowledging the trend of enterprises moving portions of their IT workloads to the cloud, Equinix “developed and is executing a channel sales strategy to enable the partner community to not only capture this opportunity, but also increase a partner’s overall revenue potential and ability to maintain a ‘trusted advisor’ status within the enterprise.” The company signed more than 350 partners last year and “our goal this year is to go deeper with our partners and help grow our mutual business together,” he said.

“Enterprise customers are demanding global hybrid cloud solutions (public/private clouds) and access to multiple public cloud services,” he said. “Equinix, with 145 data centers across the globe, offers the ideal environment for the enterprise to deploy an interconnected-oriented network architecture.”{ad}

The training and certification programs provide the “foundational sales and technical knowledge” for Equinix offerings, services and differentiation focusing on key use cases. Examples include enterprise clients desiring interconnection to Microsoft and AWS cloud for workload processing, and large global network service providers exiting the data center business, Rajiah said.

Spanning the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific, Equinix’s partner program is designed for MSPs, network service providers (NSPs), system integrators (SIs), vendors, service providers and VARs to help design and deploy cloud and IT offerings for enterprise customers.

“Avant plans to make these new offers available to the thousands of sellers in our agent community as a component of our overall training portfolio to enable them to better address customer requirements,” said Ian Kieninger, CEO of Avant Communications, an Equinix partner. “These new certifications from Equinix are well-thought out and applicable for our community to address industry trends toward more consultative selling.”

Goals for the enhanced program include: being the go-to global data-center infrastructure provider for partners to capture the enterprise marketplace; offering services to partners addressing technology trends (mobile, security, IoT); and providing partners flexibility to sell with or sell through with Equinix offerings, Rajiah said.