Prosimo Courts MSPs, VARs, SIs to ‘Select’ New Channel Program

Prosimo has launched its first formal channel partner program to help MSPs, VARs and SIs provide multicloud application delivery to their customers.

The Santa Clara, California-based cloud networking vendor emerged from stealth mode last spring. Now it is courting partners to join its three-tier program. Prosimo says it will work closely with a select number of “pre-qualified partners”  to drive success for customers.

Newly hired Timo Prietto is driving the program in his role as head of global alliances and partnerships.

Prosimo’s Dean Chenarides

“The Prosimo Next Partner Program is a result of our continued success with early partners in our first year out of stealth with strong customer adoption and a robust pipeline for 2022,” said Dean Chenarides, vice president of worldwide Sales at Prosimo. “We are fully committed to the channel and have structured our hiring, including the appointment of Timo Prietto [sic] and have also structured our partner program to reflect the value we place on their contributions. We’ve also committed significant resources to working with partners who have the right expertise to ensure our customers are fully supported and successful.”

Channel Background

Mehul Patel, head of marketing, said Prosimo had already been reaching customers through channel partners in addition to its direct salesforce.

Prosimo’ Mehul Patel

He said the company’s founders, including Viptela founder Ramesh Pragabaran, brought strong relationships into the new company. He pointed to Verizon as a key service provider partner. Other telcos are finalizing agreements with Prosimo, he said. In addition, he said a couple of systems integrators have reached out to the vendor.

However, Patel said Prosimo has already seen some of its biggest success with cloud-focused resellers and MSPs. Those include Teneo, HighPoint, Landmark, BridgeIT and Static1.

Patel said Prosimo gives these partners technical enablement for multicloud solutions.

“Even within partners that have a cloud practice, they’re either savvy in one cloud, or maybe one other cloud,” Patel told Channel Futures. “Where we are able to differentiate is that they get this expertise across all the clouds.”

Program Details

The program features a partner portal, marketing resources, support and deal registration. The company also is offering non-compete territory protection for partners that have demonstrated strength in particular regions.

“If we sign up a partner that specifically good in that region, then they get exclusivity from us, and no other partner can come into that region,” Patel said.

The same non-compete goes for the direct sales team.

“Our team is supporting them 100%. Ultimately, we want partners to be self-sufficient, but [initially] we’re definitely going to share our go-to-market motion, our scripts and all those things. And as part of that, you also get access to product technical enablement as well,” he said.

The Prosimo sales team gets incentives for working with partners, according to a spokesperson.

The program operates in three tiers with increasing expectations and benefits: Align, Accelerate and Elevate.

New Channel Leader

Timo Prietto spent the last two-and-a-half years at Aviatrix. There he built an indirect practice utilizing marketplaces from AWS, Azure and other hyperscalers. Patel said Prietto’s experiences working with cloud service providers helps him know how to best incentivize partners.

Prosimo’s Timo Prietto

Prietto said Prosimo can help customers navigate an increasingly complex multicloud environments.

“What drew me to Prosimo was the ability to help customers at any entry point of the cloud journey and then scale up and out, which is possible only because of Prosimo’s unique ability to deliver autonomous multicloud networking. There is a huge opportunity in front of us and the launch of Prosimo Next Partner Program reflects our commitment to long-term partner growth, innovation and enablement,” Prietto said.

Partner Perspectives

Teneo’s Andy de Clerck

Andy de Clerck is  Teneo‘s chief technology officer. He said Prosimo helps it give customers a single integrated management and control plane.

HighPoint’s Richard Grayson

“Enterprises are struggling to achieve connectivity to the cloud using legacy networking approaches and often get confused with networking capabilities from CSPs,” de Clerck said. “As they scale, complexity becomes a major impediment from truly realizing the full potential of the enterprise cloud.

Richard Grayson, director of HighPoint’s secure enterprise network practice, said Prosimo’s integrated infrastructure stack simplifies cloud operations.

“At HighPoint we’re focused on helping customers increase operational efficiency, improve security and reduce operational costs. Enterprises need a holistic approach to overcome challenges with complexity in their growing cloud environment. Until Prosimo delivered its AXI platform, there wasn’t a solution that could help us achieve this for our cloud-forward customers,” Grayson said.