The “Driven” program for Cisco Meraki is the first program D&H has offered specifically for Cisco Meraki, and includes measures to make it easier for small VARs to become certified on Meraki, and make more money once they are.
Zebra sells its solutions predominantly to major verticals like retail and manufacturing, where most of their partners play, but for the first time they have announced a specialization for what will be a fairly small minority of partners with a deep focus in an area.
HYCU brought a rudimentary channel program with them when they spun out of Comtrade Software earlier this year, but now they have essentially remade it, making changes to strongly align with what Nutanix is doing, and adding the kind of features channel partners expect.
Dell EMC finally made its long-awaited breakthrough in storage in the first quarter – even though on a year-over-year basis, channel storage business was actually down. It’s seen as more of a statistical fluke, rather than the harbinger of an unwanted trend, and considerable confidence around storage exists going forward.
Sennheiser is looking to their first unified communication and collaboration headset to further stimulate their Canadian business, which has already been showing strong momentum.
Claroty is interested in working with a select number of partners who are developing a focus on this relatively new space, which brings cybersecurity skills from IT to the context and problems of the OT environment.
The changes to the Pure channel program and go-to-market motions are extremely significant, impacting most things except for Pure’s commitment to a 100 per cent channel strategy.
While the financial and organizational linkages to Quest since it and SonicWall were spun together out of Dell in November 2016 were not at the level of a distraction, the removal of their final elements will benefit the company going forward.
Rozo Systems, which has been based mainly in the media and entertainment vertical, sells entirely through a select partner channel. They are now looking to augment that channel, and to that end, have introduced their first partner program.
At their Global Partner Summit kicking off their Dell Technologies World, Dell EMC delineated their channel strategy for the year ahead, and a lengthy list of program offerings designed to help execute it.
Plantronics reworks its channel program to give greater emphasis to implementing their SaaS management solution, and to selling their hardware within broader solutions rather than simply as peripherals.
Diamanti quickly adopted an all-channel go-to-market in the face of resellers looking for a turnkey enterprise container management solution, and now has introduced a program to support what will start off as a select value channel.
This fourth partnering between DNS-focused Infoblox and different McAfee solutions plugs a specific hole around DNS security that is not dealt with natively by most broad security software vendors.
Veritas remakes its partner program to add additional support for its 360 data management portfolio beyond their two core backup products.
Netwrix has revamped their North American channel program, beefing up education, enablement and support, and as a first step wants to develop a cadre of go-to partners who can do implementations and bring in business on their own.
The Dell EMC channel business overall picked up in the second half of the year – always a good sign.
Another new certification, for IoT, is being developed but not yet ready. DigiCert is also looking to manage possible channel conflict issues through a new automated deal registration system, which is still in the process of being rolled out.
Fortinet drives innovation theme to partners at their Accelerate event, and indicates some potential new opportunities looking ahead.
Armed with a new channel program, and a new exec to provide more focus on channel strategy, Qumulo looks to both improve the efficiency of its own channel, and the HPE channel that comes through their partnership with HPE.
The beginning of the new Dell EMC fiscal year in February is always the time for the most significant changes to their partner program, although the company acknowledged the changes this year are more about fine-tuning.
