WANdisco Goes All-In on Channel
Company’s new LiveData Partner Network enables SIs, resellers, others to help clients move data to cloud
WANdisco is launching its first partner program as the enterprise data migration specialist continues its shift to an all-channel business model.
The Lowdown: Over the past year, the 15-year-old company has moved from an OEM-focused approach, with 90% of revenue coming from direct sales, to a channel-first model that courts such firms as consulting partners, systems integrators, ISVs, and resellers. Now more than 50% of its business comes through the channel.
The Details: WANdisco, headquartered in both San Ramon, California, and Sheffield, England, on Thursday unveiled the global LiveData Partner Network, which is designed to enable partners to leverage the vendor’s cloud services to help clients migrate their on-premises live transactional data to the cloud without disrupting their businesses or losing data.
The vendor estimates that the addressable market for migrating Hadoop data to the cloud is worth more than $1.7 billion.
The LiveData Partner Network, which also is designed for OEMs and distributors, features:
> Three-tier system: It includes a Registered tier for new partners, a Solutions tier for those committed to doing significant business with WANdisco, and a Strategic tier, which offers a high degree of business synergy with the vendor and is targeted at partners with a broad geographical presence.
> Training: WANdisco is offering a range of instructor-led, on-site, and self-paced online training that includes technical- and sales-related courses.
> Marketing support: The vendor is providing scalable programs and resources to support go-to-market initiatives and expand a partner’s market exposure. Select partners also get access to discretionary funds to drive market awareness and demand-generation activities for attracting new business.
> Business planning: Partners can work with partner account managers to develop quarterly business plans and sales support, including advice on developing solutions, reducing time to market, and driving customer satisfaction.
> Partner portal: This gives partners access to much of the new sales, marketing, training, certification, and support resources.
The program is being led by Peter Scott, senior vice president of business development. Scott has been with WANdisco for more than 12 years, having launched OEM and strategic partnerships with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, and Alibaba Cloud and more recently forming partnerships with Microsoft and Infosys.
The Impact: Organizations over the past several years have been busy migrating more of their applications and workloads to the cloud and those efforts have accelerated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift has opened up opportunities for channel partners that have the necessary skills and tools to help enterprises safely and efficiently move workloads to the cloud.
Background: WANdisco has been building out its LiveData Cloud Services platform in recent months. The company in late September announced its partnership with Infosys to help customers migrate their data lakes to such public clouds as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, which came a week after the company unveiled LiveData Migrator to enable end users to start migrating their on-premises data to AWS.
The vendor also has announced LiveData Platform for Azure, a service available only on the Microsoft public cloud.
The company, which generated $3.6 million in revenue in its most recent quarter, counts companies like AMD, Daimler, and GoDaddy among its customers.
The Buzz: “We envision the WANdisco LiveData Partner Network to be the biggest growth driver for the company in 2021, enabling us to quickly expand and scale our business globally,” Scott said. “By partnering and selling through systems integrators, independent software vendors, distributors, and others, we believe we can help partners grow their business while providing customers with the tools to accelerate their data and application modernization plans.”
“WANdisco is dedicated to assisting customers through its partners in mitigating the business risk of large scale cloud migrations and ensuring data consistency across their hybrid environments,” said WANdisco Chairman and CEO David Richards. “This new program will make it easy for partners to tap into significant new resources and revenue streams, and greatly reduce time to value for customers in accessing cloud economics and fully realizing the value of machine learning on top of large data sets in the cloud.”
“With LiveData Partner Network, WANdisco has made it easy to do business together, providing a state-of-the-art technology platform to more rapidly onboard Motifworks sellers and cloud architects,” said Tarun Agarwal, director and practice lead for data and AI at Motifworks. “The LiveData Partner Network, coupled with WANdisco’s newly released and self-service LiveData Migrator platform, will serve to accelerate our business together and enable Motifworks to focus on the upstack aspects of customers’ digital transformation.”
