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.
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