2024 Partner Program Guide: 5-Star Software Vendor Programs

Prior to joining Juniper in 2020, Mackintosh served as the global head of channels and distribution at Extreme Networks where he deployed new partner programs and initiatives to drive partner growth and profitability and develop new enterprise business through virtual sales teams. His experience includes leading high-performance teams in executive sales and channel management roles at Fortune 100 networking and technology companies. In his current role Mackintosh drives Juniper's go-to-market strategy with partners, aimed at delivering greater business outcomes through Juniper's broad portfolio of secure, AI-driven, cloud-based solutions and managed services. While there, McCormick was one of the key individuals responsible for building the company’s managed hosting business.\

• These are a few examples of how leading IT companies and distributors are expanding their partner programs to help resellers, solution providers, MSPs and other channel partners navigate the rapidly evolving market for AI products and services.
• Channel Insider's editorial team spotlights the top AI leaders from MSPs, vendors, and channel businesses delivering measurable outcomes.
• Solution providers and strategic service providers are counting on IT vendor partners and their channel programs to provide training, support and other resources as they work with AI and other leading-edge technologies.
• Focus on delivering substantial value beyond mere transactions—commissions are great, but offering networking, exclusive events and introductions to big brands will help you stand out from other vendors.

They need to invest in revenue systems, marketing automation and people training to successfully accomplish this. Customers are moving from siloed products and many legacy SIEM vendors are struggling to compete, creating demand for next generation SIEM. Second, partners that continue to grow their subscription services portfolio and realize the benefits of recurring revenue will outperform those who do not.

McCormick manages all aspects of operations, client services and sales for Intermedia and pulls from his 20-plus years of experience to provide 24-7 managed services support for customers and partners. Woolley leads global sales, strategy and programs for the IBM ecosystem, supporting the company’s tens of thousands of partners as they deliver value to clients with AI and hybrid cloud solutions and services. Throughout her career King has successfully designed, managed and delivered award-winning global partner programs; developed growth plans and programs for declining partner bases; and implemented global multi-tier recruitment, enablement and certification programs. A key focus was integrating inside sales into the partner organization to enhance partner relationship management with continued evolution of the organization to become more partner-centric with a goal of more than 90 percent indirect. King's responsibilities also include constructing and delivering a global partner program that is flexible and scalable in its design to embrace new types of partners and business models, including as-a-service, managed services and co-creation. During the last year Soper has accelerated the transformation of HPE's as-a-service partner ecosystem by attracting new partners to HPE's edge-to-cloud platform, HPE GreenLake, and expanding business with traditional partners.

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Investing in sales and marketing strategies will continue to be an important growth factor for MSPs to improve their lead generation efforts and overall profitability. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, our partners can invest in many different areas to drive growth in the coming year. Build up MSP/CSP capabilities and deploy services above the infrastructure layers. Continue supporting customers' broad digital transformations. We anticipate our channel partners will make significant investments to deepen their expansion into the education market to address the looming Windows 11 transition.

Types of Companies You'll Meet

The scope of her duties include programmatic and strategic alliances across global and regional system integrators, MSPs, certified cloud and service providers, ISVs, infrastructure partners, and the distribution and resale channel. He says he has a talent for aligning business objectives with partner capabilities and expertise in crafting comprehensive sales strategies, fostering alliances, and leveraging emerging technologies to optimize overall channel performance. Behind his personal achievements he cites his transparency, ability to effectively balance strategy and execution, success at building long-standing partner relationships, and a deep commitment to developing his teams. She led the transformation of how NetApp works with partners that puts them first, rewards investments, and provides resources and services that ensure success. These interactions accelerate the momentum in N-able’s commitment to building its global partner community and channel to foster peer-to-peer engagement, Weeks says.

In her global role Krause is focused on helping Sophos maintain its status as a market leader in the security industry and ensuring that partners across the globe have the programs and support they need to make succeeding with Sophos simple. His track record of establishing and expanding partner relationships includes driving 3X growth in partner-initiated opportunities at both previous companies. Marks has over 20 years of experience building and leading strategic global partner programs including 15 years in cybersecurity at SentinelOne, Splunk and Palo Alto Networks. Marks is responsible for expanding the reseller partner global ecosystem at SentinelOne, increasing partner profitability, ensuring delivery of robust enablement vehicles and providing program differentiation in the market.

O’Hara devoted 2023 to building a culture of partner centricity within Splunk, and improving partner profitability through modernized channel incentives, subsidized training, and Partnerverse program transformation. O'Hara is responsible for evolving Splunk's channel strategy and ecosystem to improve the customer and partner experience and scaling Splunk solutions to support customers operating in a distributed, hybrid, multi-cloud world. She also aligned the channel team to better support key channel partners by implementing ways for partners to realize better margins from program offerings.

Examples Of Effective Channel Partnerships

In his first year at Zscaler Soderlund revamped the company’s internal teams, improved alignment, and hired key leaders to enhance support for partners on both the sales and technical side. His resume includes more than 25 years of customer-facing experience in sales and business development at companies from early-stage startups to rapidly growing midsize companies, to top-five technology industry titans. In 2023 Falaro supported the expansion of Wasabi’s distribution strategy aligned with the growth of the company’s top alliances. In addition, he works with engineering, operations, product management and customer support as a single unified team focused on building, managing, selling and supporting the company’s cloud storage services.

Our partner ecosystem will need to continue to build skills and capabilities that combine unified security and observability with a platform to conquer unique customer challenges with baked-in and extensible AI. Splunk has leveraged analytics and AI from the beginning and now will expand with generative AI capabilities. Investing in the customer's lifecycle goes hand-in-hand with delivering managed services. In 2024 channel partners should prioritize investments in managed services. We encourage partners to leverage our learning and enablement offerings and changes to our Competency Framework in 2024.

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The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system integrator (SI) award recognizes partners with the AWS SaaS Competency with deep experience helping organizations design and build SaaS and cloud-native solutions on AWS. But we’re augmenting it with higher MDF—$25,000 of MDF and a whole lot more benefits,” said Chen. AWS is expanding the program with new benefits for partners adopting AWS’ new Partner Revenue Management and are engaged in co-sell activities, with expanded benefits for partners that are deployed on AWS. “So channel partners 2024 we have performance-based signature benefits that reward the partners based on real outcomes, and we continue to add to it,” she said.

The program provides incentives and support across new AWS customers around security, generative AI, migration and modernization. Your teams get the guidance they need, they get sales plays, customer pipeline insights, funding recommendations—all of that,” Chen said. It consolidates what were previously fragmented systems and separate portals for co-sell, AWS Marketplace, funding, and support into one platform. The platform automates opportunity management, surfaces real-time funding eligibility, and eliminates administrative friction that slows deals. There are simpler managed services around support and around financial optimization, but there’s sophisticated managed services around DevSecOps and AIOps and actually doing agentic development on behalf of the customer. When it comes to why a solution provider chooses to join a vendor’s partner program, all signs point to the ones that offer the highest levels of lead generation, business development resources, training opportunities, incentives and more.