Changing Channels

Channel events and conferences are common, but not always great. Vendors want to build enthusiasm and momentum by bringing partners together to hear about products, programs, and objectives. Achieving that goal takes more than just setting dates and bringing partners to a hotel ballroom. It requires vision and thoughtful planning and execution. And what happens before and after channel events is just as important as what happens at the conference itself, if not more so. Lori Cornmesser, Infoblox’s vice president of worldwide partner and alliance sales, joins Pod2112 to talk about her first partner summit at Infoblox and what it takes to pull off a great partner event.

The job of a channel chief is to build and manage relationships with partners to generate sales that contribute to their company’s goals. They curate those relationships through channel programs designed to reward partners based on their investments and performance. Channel chiefs frequently look to improve their programs, but often within or additive to their existing program structures. Rarely does a channel chief get the opportunity to build a whole new channel program from the ground up in an organization that has a channel. That’s the opportunity Sandra Glaser Cheek had at Ciena. She and her team spent the last year building a new, innovative channel program in parallel to their existing program. Building the channel program took much planning, coordination and investment. Cheek joins Pod2112 to talk about her new program, the Ciena Partner Network, and what it took to build a channel that’s different from the standard model.

Channel conflict is an unavoidable fact. Despite the controls and efforts of channel leaders, vendors and partners invariably come into conflict by competing for the same business in the field. Partners generally accept that channel conflict will happen periodically and that they’ll sometimes find themselves on the losing side of the conflict-resolution equation. What matters more to partners is how vendors try to mitigate conflict and adjudicate incidents. Failure to curb channel conflict can cost vendors and partners alike – and dearly. Atrion Communications is learning about the severe effects of channel conflict as its grapples with the aftereffects of one of its primary vendors taking a deal direct. Atrion lost $9.5 million on the deal, and a whole lot more. Atrion CEO Pat Grillo joins Pod2112 to share his story and discuss what vendors need to know about the consequences of channel conflict from a partner’s perspective.

The IoT space consists of billions of devices, touches a variety of vertical markets, and presents an extraordinarily large total addressable market. For innovative entrepreneurs, the key to success today is developing IoT solutions that are highly scalable, repeatable, and reliable. Investors seek entrepreneurs who can create widely consumable enterprise solutions to solve real-world problems; achieve efficiencies with data; make intelligent observations; and match the right solutions to the right customers. Michael Dolbec, senior managing director of venture capital and corporate business development at GE Ventures, talks to Pod2112 about the future of IoT and what makes a digital start-up investment-worthy in today’s competitive climate.

In a world where tens of billions of Internet-enabled devices communicate with one another, we can now do things we never could before. Think home automation, self-driving cars, and telemedicine. By leveraging IoT and fog and edge computing, today’s businesses can identify KPIs and extract immense value from the data that’s generated and shared by connected devices. Perry Lea, principal technologist at Microsoft and the co-founder of Rumble, joins Pod2112 to discuss the growth path of these technologies, how Moore’s Law is impacting their evolution, why fog computing is the clear route to our future, which industries will flounder and excel, and how systems integrators can tap the fog to add value to systems and solutions.

Cisco’s Andrew Sage: The Vendor Perspective on Distribution

Distribution is a valued resource for the technology industry and channel. For decades, distributors have provided vendors and partners with the logistical support they need to get products into the hands of customers. While distributors continue to provide valuable services and support to vendors, the market is changing rapidly as vendors, partners, and customers shift their models to services, and many vendors are questioning what role distribution will play in the services era. Will distributors, many of which have developed services arms and added more support mechanisms, continue to provide the value-add support that vendors rely upon today? Andrew Sage, vice president of Americas distribution at Cisco Systems, joins Pod2112 to discuss the evolving role and value of distribution from a vendor perspective.

Hardware and software companies such as Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft built the technology channel. They recruited and cultivated value-added resellers, systems integrators, and managed service providers to reach niche market segments, provide integration and customization services, and deliver maintenance and administrative services. Companies tapping into the technology channel today don’t necessarily look like Cisco and Microsoft. They don’t even look like Google and Amazon, but technology is so pervasive that every company is a technology company at some level. These new companies tapping the technology channel leverage cloud computing and software to deliver their services, and they’re discovering that they need the resources and capabilities of technology channel partners to meet customer needs and drive growth. Square, which provides sellers with software services to run and grow their businesses, is one such company. It’s launched a channel program to tap VARs, systems integrators, and digital agencies to help users connect its payment, point-of-sale, and payroll services to other systems and reach new customers and markets. Pankaj Bengani, the global partnerships lead at Square, joins Pod2112 to discuss how the company recognized its need for channel partners and how it plans to leverage partners’ technical capabilities to facilitate growth.

Consolidation is rampant in the managed services segment, with vendors building and acquiring multiple capabilities to enable MSPs to provide wide arrays of managed, security, and backup services. The goal of these vendors is to create one-stop shops for MSPs so they need not go anywhere else for their tools. While this sounds like a good strategy, it flies in the face of a decade in which MSPs built their technology capabilities through a best-of-breed approach. The question: Is the one-stop-shop approach better than the best-of-breed method for building managed services practices? Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola joins Pod2112 to talk about how his company is finding success with the one-stop-shop approach and how that model will sustain continued growth.

Businesses want the benefits of Big Data, as they see data-driven decision-making as a means for making better choices that generate higher returns with less risk. At least that’s the promise. Before businesses can leverage the power of Big Data, though, they first need “the data.” Each day, businesses generate terabytes of structured and unstructured data from traditional endpoints and network systems, mobile devices, and an increasing volume of Internet of Things devices. Collecting, cataloging, and managing that data for use in analytics is a huge challenge. Informatica’s Balaji Subramanian shares insights on how to gain control over the piles of bits and bytes that are the raw fuel for Big Data.

Silicon Valley is where technology dreams are made. Tech entrepreneurs are like the forty-niners of the California Gold Rush; they’re flocking to the tech centers in hopes of hitting the mother lode with their innovative and great ideas. But building a business is hard. It takes vision, planning, hard work, money, and determination. Not every tech venture makes it, and very few make it big. But those few start-ups that are extraordinarily successful have a special name: unicorns. A unicorn is a start-up valued at $1 billion or more. What does it take to build a unicorn? Crowdstrike Co-founder and CEO George Kurtz joins Pod2112 to talk about what it took to start his innovative endpoint security company and get it to that unicorn status.