LIKE MANY VENDORS, Nerdio designed its partner program with its competitors in mind. The difference in this case is that those “competitors” are the very people the company most wants as members: channel pros who have yet to get serious about building a cloud practice.
“It’s people who just don’t know. It’s people who are maybe trying to do it themselves. It’s people who are struggling to do it themselves,” says Joseph Landes (pictured), Nerdio’s chief revenue officer.
In Nerdio’s view, those lost souls, rather than other vendors, are the biggest obstacle to its continued growth. Nerdio Manager for MSP, the vendor’s heavily automated flagship product, is designed to help them stand up a Microsoft Azure environment and fill it with virtual desktops in 60 minutes or less. “That will take even an Azure expert several days if not a week,” Landes says.
That value proposition alone, though, isn’t enough to win over some channel pros, so Nerdio’s Partnerd partner program, founded just over a year ago and updated this month, offers an unusually rich set of benefits. Members at the bronze, silver, gold, and platinum levels all get a dedicated partner success manager and multiple engagements with “go-live engineers” trained to help MSPs get their clients up and running on Azure.
There are plenty of free internal use licenses too, and licensing discounts ranging from 25% to 75%. Gold and platinum members can apply for up to $2,500 of MDF, and platinum members can host Azure-focused “lunch and learn” events that Nerdio pays for and manages on their behalf.
Also available exclusively to platinum members is the new Partnerd Advantage Enhanced Support program, which for $2,000 a month offers Azure technical assistance that Microsoft should provide but too often doesn’t. “A lot of MSPs have a lot of questions about Azure and find that when they try to get support from Microsoft, they’re sort of put at the back of the queue,” Landes says.
Given that Nerdio’s mission is bringing newcomers into the Microsoft cloud, it’s perhaps no surprise that training and enablement figure prominently among Partnerd’s membership perks. “We prioritize educating MSPs and showing them and teaching them and working with them to build a successful cloud practice,” Landes says.
To that end, Partnerd members get free certifications in Nerdio products along with access to technical training camps in varying locations throughout the year. “We teach them in a very hands-on way for a full day how to build a cloud practice,” Landes says. The events are free and Nerdio even covers room and board for one night.
Business leaders, meanwhile, can join Nerdio CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy at one of the vendor’s CEO Summits. “The idea is to take some of our existing partners and create a very intimate environment where they can learn from us, and quite frankly where we can learn from them as well,” Landes explains.
Upper tier partners can tap into Nerdio’s tight relationships with senior Microsoft executives. “For our gold and platinum partners, we set up exclusive calls with Microsoft leadership to talk about different trends,” Landes says.
Weekly online “office hours” give business and technical leaders alike an opportunity to ask questions, make product suggestions, and share insights. “We’ve found that a lot of MSPs who may have dropped in for other reasons are learning from their peers,” Landes notes.
In return for all that, Nerdio asks Partnerd members to make spending commitments for a minimum of six months in amounts ranging from $300 a month at the bronze level to $5,000 a month at the platinum level. For precisely zero dollars a month, members at the standard tier get one go-live engineering engagement and 10 internal use licenses, among other benefits.
“We didn’t want to leave anyone behind,” Landes says. Given the billions of dollars businesses are spending on Microsoft cloud services every year, channel pros, you can’t afford to let yourself get left behind.
