Credit: ID 40653670 © Ken Wolter | Dreamstime.com
Cloud delivery and performance vendor Akamai Technologies has flagged upcoming updates to its partner offerings with a new partner program.
The vendor claimed the new partner program, which expands on its existing one, will offer “greater” flexibility, support and financial incentives and plans to roll partners over to it during the next six months.
At the heart of the update is an enablement program, which Akamai claims will offer partners training, certification and support to sell and service its products.
“We have designed our program to offer partners more flexibility, the opportunity for better profitability and more resources to deliver value-added services to their customers,” said Micheal McCollough, global vice president of channels and alliances at Akamai.
“Certified partners that deliver more services to customers benefit the most, maximizing the return on their investment in service delivery resources.”
Through the certification process with the new program, partners can opt for basic or advance certification levels, with more training options and pricing incentives for Advance partners.
The difference between the certification levels, according to Parimal Pandya, managing director APJ and vice president of the media and carrier division at Akamai, is that basic certification is based on deal registration skills, while advance certification is more in-depth.
“Basic would focus on skills needed to identify and qualify opportunities to register deals, for roles such as sales, presales, support engineer," he said. “Whereas advanced would focus on 'identify' through 'close' to ‘support' stages with training that includes demos, scoping, PoCs, configuration geared to roles from sales, and presales, to solution architects.”
The partner program’s structure — based on the three tiers of Select, Premier and Elite — rewards partners based partly on the total annual revenue they generate, with Select for those generating over $100,000 in revenue, premier for over $2 million in revenue and elite for over $4 million in revenue.
Regardless of tier, partners in the program will qualify for partner development funds and marketing resources, which include co-branded templates, programs-in-a-box, access to the Akamai Partner portal, and annual business planning sessions to help partners with planning and executing campaigns.
The other part of the tier progression is also based on partners’ level of certification, either at the basic or advance level, with advanced partners gaining access to “the most attractive wholesale rates within their program tier”, according to Pandya.
The new program also splits partner engagement into three categories — solutions providers, fulfillment partners and global systems integrators. According to the vendor, this will allow for businesses to align their relationship with Akamai alongside their own business models.
Solution providers in particular were singled out by the vendor as now having the ability to offer a variety of assistance related to Akamai products, covering sales, service and support.
The vendor said its financial incentives for partners have been realigned, with an emphasis on “greater” reward promised by the vendor for those that deliver “greater” value to customers with Akamai products.
The incentives, which include pricing and deal registration rebates, increase by tier. Referring again to solution providers, Pandya said this subgroup of partners have access of margins up to 40 per cent by being certified to deliver advance services, as well as design and implementation capabilities.
Meanwhile, demand gen-oriented partners are eligible for margins of between 15 to 20 per cent.
Additionally, its tiered sales value structure has been updated in what it claims is an attempt to provide “globally consistent benefits”.
