A Partner Tale: Egnyte’s Journey with the Channel
We’re committed to the channel and have made it a key priority over the last few years. 2013 was an expansive year for us, and 2014 has already proven to show our continued investment in the channel, with signs of substantial growth. We are doubling down on the channel efforts with our latest round of funding by opening new regional offices for local support. We’re also adding resources and taking every measure possible to sign up, train, enable and prime the channel for growth.
One of our strategic partners is NetApp, and we recently participated in their very successful Partner Academy, which provides training opportunities for partners locally in cities throughout North America, including New York City, Calgary, Houston, Dallas and Austin. All of these are important and relevant cities to Egnyte’s growth plan, not to mention a great way to work face-to-face with our partners and share the Egnyte story all in one place.Partner Academy is led by NetApp channel leaders and includes sponsor-led presentations. Throughout the day, attendees can visit the partner pavilion and chat with sponsors to learn more about their value-add to the NetApp platform. We just wrapped up our first event in New York City with 200+ attendees, where we had some great conversations with channel teams looking to work more closely with us this year.The uniqueness of Egnyte’s offering really stood out at this event. Most VARs and MSPs attending these partner roadshows don’t offer a file, sync and share solution like Egnyte. So when a VAR rep visiting our booth does the math, he quickly realizes that he can go back to his NetApp customers (or prospects) and sell a software layer that cloud-enables NetApp AND allows his business to sell more and reap higher benefits of re-occurring revenue.
In New York, we were fortunate enough to have our local team in attendance, which afforded me the time to step back and witness just how busy the booth was. We had a steady stream of partners all day long, some signing up and committing right on the spot! Overall, it was a great event for meeting new partners and sharing what Egnyte has to offer for the channel.Now on to the hard part -- follow up. Signing up, engaging and enabling these partners is huge task, but we’re committed 100% to our channel partners and want to ensure both partners and Egnyte experience positive ROI. Next stop… Calgary and Texas (Dallas, Houston and Austin). Are you joining?Are you an interested VAR or MSP? Does your installed base use Egnyte or ask about file sharing, sync and storage for business? If you’re interested in learning more, contact us at resellers@egnyte.com and check out the details.
*Ross Kemp is a director of business development at Egnyte. He manages our Storage Partner ecosystem and has been in the industry for 20+ years. When not at work, he loves spending time with his family, checking out vintage cars and making wine. Be sure to follow him on Twitter: @KRossKemp.
