It can take a village to develop the comprehensive infrastructure solutions and seamless cloud migration strategies needed to address today’s critical business issues. Channel pros have seen an increased demand from customers and prospects to solve their IT complexity challenges due to rushed digital transformation efforts in 2020. Organizations are looking for solutions that will address challenges in managing, providing visibility, and securing hybrid cloud environments, while maintaining the ROI on their current solutions.
As businesses find themselves adapting to meet the demands of an evolving workforce and a digital economy, hybrid cloud adoption is increasing. However, simultaneously adopting multiple cloud options is causing a rapid increase in IT complexity. This complexity creates a gap across the enterprise, with each cloud infrastructure becoming its own “”island”” of visibility.
Providing comprehensive visibility into expanding cloud workloads, eliminating security and compliance blind spots, and simplifying hybrid cloud adoption are going to require ongoing collaboration within the channel—partners and vendors—to ensure successful implementation. Channel pros must adjust their approach to cloud deployment and seek vendor partners that can help them address the gap in cloud visibility for data in motion.
Align on Common Goals
Channel pros and their vendor partners must have aligned goals. There’s been a massive increase in demand for cloud services and security over the past year. Channel partners and vendors must work together to meet that demand with new offerings.
Encourage Collaboration
Training and enabling are other critical elements to success. Channel partners should expect to be briefed on new products and offerings as soon as they’re available in order to establish a true team mentality.
As we enter the recovery phase of the pandemic, businesses will continue to push digital transformation efforts, which of course come with formidable challenges. However, the efforts of the past year have shown us the importance of collaboration within the technology industry. Utilizing insights from a diverse and expansive set of channel partnerships has proven how organizational alliances can be successful when combating security threats. This is a mindset that must continue as we adjust to the new normal and rely further on the cloud to ensure operational success.
Align on Marketing
Channel partners are looking for technology stacks that work well together and integrate seamlessly with existing tools. Collaborating with vendors means proper integration, but it also means alignment on value proposition and marketing programs that channel partners can present to their own customers.
The future may be uncertain, but we know that a channel-first model will continue being critical to resilience, no matter what challenges the future might have in store. Collaboration and aligned marketing strategies will keep the community of channel partners working successfully together to ensure continued seamless cloud migration.
Larissa Crandall is the vice president, worldwide channels and alliances at Gigamon, where she is responsible for managing channel business teams and building a strong partner community. With over 20 years of experience transforming global partner ecosystems in the high-tech industry, Crandall plays an integral role in building creative demand generation, training and enablement, financing for partners amid the pandemic, and working with the Gigamon ecosystem to develop go-to-market solutions.
