Bold Journeys Podcast

With over $300 billion in customer commitments to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, the hyperscaler marketplace should play a strategic role in every IT vendor’s go-to-market strategy. But how do you partner successfully with these hyperscalers when you’re also competing with them? That co-opetition is something many people in your C-Suite fear and it can drive a wedge in what could be a very successful partnership.

Today’s guest, Alan Chhabra, EVP of Worldwide Partners at MongoDB, mastered hyperscaler co-opetition with a customer-centric business strategy. Alan shares the critical success factors for MongoDB and how they navigated successful partnerships with Microsoft and other hypercalers despite the direct competition they initially faced.

Here are the top 10 lessons I learned about mastering hyperscaler co-opetition from Alan:

As a podcast host and partner ecosystem fanatic, one of the greatest experiences is sitting down with a fellow podcaster and partnering fanatic. I had just that opportunity a few weeks ago when I traveled to Boca Raton, Florida to be on Vince Menzione’s Ultimate Partner Podcast.

You’ll hear our conversation in today’s episode where we talk about everything from our early days of podcasting and my predictions for 2024 and 2025. We dive into our insights on the evolving dynamics of partner ecosystems and the strategic mindset required to harness their full potential.

You’ll hear about my offshore sailing and how it aligns with successful partnering, with lessons you can use in your partnering efforts in this increasingly competitive and interconnected business landscape.

Here are five highlights from my conversation with Vince on successful partnering in 2025:

The Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry is poised for massive growth to serve the technology needs of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). But there’s a massive hurdle in their way. The core unit economics of MSPs are broken.

Today’s guest, Kaseya’s CEO Fred Voccola is on mission to fix that problem. Kaseya is not only revolutionizing the MSP business model but is also contributing to the stability and growth of the global economy. This mission-driven approach ensures that Kaseya and its partners are aligned toward creating lasting value.

Here are the top five drivers Fred shared for Kaseya’s mission to change Managed Service Providers (MSP) economics:

What if there was a way you could increase your total addressable market and open up a whole new channel of partners? What if this strategic move not only enhanced customer satisfaction, but also significantly boosted your company’s market valuation and overall growth trajectory? All this is possible by adding a new revenue model to your business.

We’re all used to paying for utilities like power and water on a monthly basis based on how much we use each month. That’s exactly how many customers, especially smaller business owners, want to purchase IT services to protect and run their business. In turn, the Managed Services Providers who serve these customers want to buy and bundle technologies from vendors in the same fashion.

In this episode of Channel Journeys, Randy Schirman, VP Worldwide Partnerships at Vectra AI, shares how you can achieve all of these things by serving the needs of the customer and the partner. Randy provides valuable tips on what it takes to execute this strategy based on a utility-based Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) model.

Here are my top 10 lessons learned from Randy on building an MRR model to capture radical business growth:

I’ve gained and shared a ton of channel smarts over the past 6 years producing 150 episodes of the Channel Journeys podcast. It’s hard to condense all this knowledge into one episode, so I aimed at summarizing the key insights for successful partnering. It’s an almost impossible task given the wealth of knowledge shared by my fantastic guests.  

It took me awhile to come up with a strategy for finding the top advice from 150 episodes. I started by reviewing all 150 podcast episodes and classifying them based on the core topic. I found they all fell into 17 different categories.  The top 5 categories were:

I pulled out highlights from my more recent podcasts in these top categories and made sure everything applies just as much today as when I aired the podcast. These insights will help any organization thrive in the partner ecosystem.

I’d like to give a very big heartfelt shout-out to the 120 guests who have been on my show. Thank you for joining me on this channel journey!  

OK, I couldn’t keep it to just 10. Here are my top 11 lessons learned on successful partnering from the first 150 episodes of the podcast: