At our annual partner conference last October, Extreme introduced our new unified partner program, combining existing and acquired programs and technologies from Zebra Technologies’ WLAN business, Avaya’s networking business and Brocade’s data center networking business. This series of acquisitions presented an opportunity for Extreme to take the best of several programs and create one unified Extreme Partner Program.
We’ve delivered on what we promised last fall with the new Extreme Partner Program rolling out now globally. It is very exciting because it helps our channel partners and distributors broaden their networking portfolio and deliver more comprehensive networking solutions to end customers. The new program provides partners with easy pathways to cross-sell solutions and gives them access to a wider range of solutions and services than they had before. The good news is we now have more depth in our offerings to help us create more financial incentives, offer more rewards and make our market development funds (MDF) program more flexible and accessible to more partners.
There are many upgrades to our partner program, such as new tiers to reward partners for their commitment to Extreme, including the Black Diamond status. Black Diamond partners receive premium benefits, including an Extreme concierge. On top of that new profitable financial incentives have been introduced to drive partners toward cross selling across all product lines, to support individual growth plans and net new customer acquisitions.
Aside from helping our partners make more profit, another objective for us is to help our channel respond to evolving customer demands and requirements. Customers are demanding more automation and ease-of-use in their business applications. We are responding by expanding and refreshing our training and specialization programs across all switching, wireless and software solutions. This will help solutions providers differentiate their capabilities and increase the value they add to customers. The simplicity, incentives and all other program benefits are designed to empower all our partners to capitalize on market trends.
Networking solution providers and others that provide connectivity services are supremely critical to making the next IT evolution work. Sure, hybrid Cloud, content development networks (CDNs) and security solutions are all important to deliver the applications people and businesses need. None of that works, though, without networking. There is an incredible opportunity for companies that solve networking challenges for customers.
In the coming years, networking is going to be even more important. Just about anything can be a device today. Even cars can have their own IP addresses. Forbes recently published a roundup of IoT market size predictions, with most estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars. There is no doubt that an extraordinary amount of devices will be coming online over the next few years, and many will be equipped to transmit or receive high-bandwidth data.
How can we serve our partners in a way that sets them up to do great work for their customers and helps us drive mutual financial success?
The new Extreme Partner Program is the most recent step toward that end. We hope you will love it. Please send us your feedback so we can further evolve this unified program together, in partnership.
