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Workspot, the born-in-the-cloud VDI and DaaS company, on Tuesday rolled out a Cloud Consulting Partner Program to complement its DaaS 2.0 offering that combines Workspot with Azure. This new program augments a global Reseller Partner Program that the vendor launched earlier this year.

The four-year-old startup, founded by executives from Citrix and VMware, is now a key challenger to both of those vendors with its DasS 2.0 multi-tenant, cloud-first product.

“Given where we’re packaging Azure and Workspot together, the role of the partner becomes more of an ecosystem of putting a solution together. Our Cloud Consulting Partner Program allows us to take the leadership in terms of the packaging of Azure and the billing pain of Azure away from the end client, but also allows the partner to add value to the service from a consulting level, a support level and then selling adjacent services into the same customer,” Hamish McNee, senior direct of worldwide channels at Workspot, told us.

This more collaborative approach to partnering with the channel is recent, and is seen developing with born in the cloud vendors — look at Salesforce as an example. Whereas traditional partner programs were built for on-premises hardware solutions, this newer type of partner program is more aligned with cloud solutions that generate new service requirements.

So, how does this new type of partner program work?{ad}

At Workspot, the cloud consultant provides a customer referral or introduction to Workspot, and the vendor and partner jointly sell into the customer. The vendor builds an Azure and Workspot tenancy environment on behalf of the customer and shares revenue with the partner via a referral revenue fee that’s based on the Workspot/Azure build.

“The consulting partner is able to build a process around management, selling adjacent services, such as other Office 365 subscriptions or other tenancies, or migrating workloads, for the client, for example,” McNee said.

Workspot’s DaaS 2.0 solution, a packaged Workspot and Azure product, targets customers looking for this packaged type of offering. Workspot is looking for consulting partners who are familiar with end-user computing consulting skill sets and less so with screwdrivers and on-premises hardware. The latter partner type is more a fit for Workspot’s Reseller Partner Program, according to McNee. Partners are also expected to understand Azure and Microsoft solution sets.

A potential Workspot consulting partner is involved in the …

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… presale assistance and/or recommendation of a VDI or hosted desktop solution — a systems integrator, end-user computing partner, or a traditional Citrix or Workspot resell partner that wants to move up the value chain with the client rather than lose them to a cloud-based solution.

Think of this next-gen partner program as offering higher-value consulting services with the co-sell and shared risk.

Workspot isn’t interested in building the consulting partner program with thousands of partners doing micro transactions, but rather is interested in partners with which it could be more deeply engaged.

Partner enablement includes the co-sell opportunity and a ride along with the customer success team.{ad}

“The customer success team is key to any cloud business. It allows you to be sticky and make sure that the solution delivers what was promised,” McNee explained.

In traditional vendor-partner programs, vendors train the partners on their solutions and basically sends them out alone into the wild.

Workspot does offer demand-generation training for partners, in addition to templates for customer calls and email campaigns. Workspot also does live presentations, globally.