Cloud infrastructure provider ZeroStack Monday unveiled its global Cloud Innovation Partner Program, its inaugural program for its partner community.

Aimed at resellers who want to transition to selling cloud platforms and services, the program provides benefits tailored around the capabilities of each partner. Each partner category has a customized partnership model within the program, which is designed to maximize value for that partner type’s business model.

ZeroStack’s Steve Garrison

Steve Garrison, ZeroStack’s vice president of sales and business development, tells Channel Partners that many VARs have expressed concern over “just selling hardware, no margin, no differentiation.”

“Frankly cloud is a threat to them since customers may only buy SaaS products,” he said. “We believe the program is a catalyst that removes fear and gives the partner the tools and insights they need to transform their business. Our best example is Morris (Technology Partners) that wanted to extend their MSP services to multitenancy cloud services. They needed the right cloud software to do this. Our intelligent software gives them the technology they need to offer comparable services to AWE/Azure and Google Cloud.”

“Working with ZeroStack has given me the opportunity to help my customers see immediate cost savings by migrating away from expensive pay-by-the-byte, third-party public cloud solutions while keeping all public cloud benefits like self-service provisioning and ease of use,” said Lou D’Angeli, Morris Technology‘s chief information officer. “My customers are happier with their infrastructure environment, and my technical team can manage their environment with a fraction of the staff needed for some other vendors. With the new (program), I have even more opportunity for joint engagement, pipeline development and profit for my business.”

The program is designed to accelerate partners’ ability to bring their customers the “benefits of public cloud at a fraction of the cost, and to offer the control, security and performance of a private cloud environment,” according to ZeroStack.

“We launched our first VAR-focused program in May of 2016, (and) that program helped us recruit 15 partners in North America,” Garrison said. “That said, we also had discussions with dozens more that wanted to ‘make the move’ but felt stuck, either through perceived lack of the right product, and/or the perceived issue of finding, hiring and keeping the right talent to run these services. Additionally there was concern over ‘how much money can I actually make?’. And to the point we offer three key tactics to the program: a revenue modeling tool, so they can look at return on their cash investment and predict cash flow positive; (and) boot camps and other demand-generation tactics that we wrap into the program. We help them bring on their first two customers to the new cloud services.”

Program benefits include: customized product access and sales incentives; expertise development with sales and technical training to ensure partners are well versed on the ZeroStack cloud platform; and marketing and sales tools aimed at simplifying and accelerating a partner’s ability to “help their customers start experiencing the benefits of migrating away from the expensive V-tax or stopping the spiraling costs of a third-party public cloud,” according to ZeroStack.