Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 09 | Page 49

EDITOR’S QUESTION Investing in quality partners for success The evolving IT industry creates a unique challenge for the channel who need to marry technologies together to address customers’ business challenges, says Alexander Foroozandé, Channel Director – META at Infoblox. T he IT industry is the fastest evolving industry out there with a myriad of various different technologies and solutions. A subject matter expert today could be completely out of the loop tomorrow. This creates a unique challenge for the channel community who need to marry these technologies together to address customers’ business challenges. In short, it’s not enough to be a technically well- rounded IT professional, you need to understand your customers’ business challenges and be able to articulate the overall solution. Cybersecurity is probably the fastest growing and changing industry today. Cyber threats are continuously evolving and, as such, companies are looking for new ways to keep the ‘bad guys’ in check. As such, IT professionals in the channel community have to be in top form and well trained and certified to articulate their value proposition to their customers. Most vendors provide unique and exclusive access to their partner portals where resellers can find the latest version of their solutions. These portals typically have various different content, tailored to both engineers and sales professionals. Resellers should always request access to A s an automation and security company, describe how you support the channel to stay abreast of the latest technology by training and certification programmes? these portals and stay up-to-date. We are not focused on the quantity of partners, but rather on the quality of partners. We look for partners with exceptional reputation of excellence in service and with solid expertise in applications, networking and/ or security. We have put in place a very aggressive training and certification programme tailored to the type of partners with whom we want to work. We have already experienced great success in creating ‘Centres of Excellence’ at some partners that have exceptional Infoblox capabilities and we carry almost the full commercial burden of making this happen. This enables partners to focus on ramping up on the technology rather than finding the money to do so. We have invested in local spare parts depots and professional services expertise to help partners with many of the local implementations and support early on as they gear up their knowledge and capabilities. As a young IT leader in the region, our top two focused initiatives are ‘Channel Coverage’ and ‘Channel Enablement’. Ensuring we have a very capable channel in every country in the region is a top priority and we are well on our way. We have issued a challenge to our distribution partners to increase their Alexander Foroozandé, Channel Director – META (Middle East, Turkey & Africa) at Infoblox. technical, sales and geographical coverage and they have risen to the occasion. We continue to work very closely to focus on delivering more value to our customers and partners through our distribution, including executing lead generation campaigns, conducting proof of concepts and demos, and training and certifying our key partners. All Infoblox, partners can expect a fast response to their needs or queries and, at all times, have the knowledge no matter what the issue that they’re backed up by an excellent direct touch and executive team who are 100 per cent channel focused. We have set up a weekly webinar that covers our entire portfolio of solutions and other topics, such as how to do better business with us, which repeats itself every month. While each webinar addresses a separate topic, our channel community doesn’t necessarily need to sit through them in sequence. We also have a Partner Exchange forum that occurs on a quarterly basis, where we invite our partners to essentially attend a workshop. We’ve further invested into our training centres across the region for those partners who want to acquire post-sales accreditation in their efforts to become more ‘sticky’ to their customers.  49