Druva, with a pile of new money behind it, has launched Compass, a new partner programme aimed at accelerating customers’ digital transformation. It has moved to being a channel player over the last three years and is now 100% channel in Europe. The new Compass programme will offer expanded enablement resources, a robust accreditation curriculum, and a streamlined sales process, it says.
Timm Hoyt, vice president, global partners and alliances, Druva tells IT Europa “Public cloud is having a big impact across all elements of business, whether you are an end-user customer, a solutions partner, MSP and or whether you are a vendor. The data protection landscape is not new by any stretch of imagination and has gone through a number of transitional changes in how IT organisations and customers deploy and manage IT.
“The data protection platform for the cloud era is really the mantra we're driving and where we have confidence based on over 4000 customers.”
“Our partner communities are great ambassadors and accelerators, so having a partner like SoftCat, for example, with its reputation and proving it to their customers is an instant validation point. Our sweet spot is the 500-1000 employee range and that is where SoftCat operates. So they are a great example of what a partner looks like for us.”
“The Compass launch is going to be a big step in that direction as well. We are very loyal to our current partners and there's no intention to change that, but we do think there is room to expand our partner community without cannibalising the growth trajectory that some of our heritage partners have had.”
“There is a great ecosystem of newer, born-in-the-cloud and consulting partners that don't really have a infrastructure data centre history. That whole community is one where our story resonates extremely well, given our cloud native posture.”
And the AWS link? (Druva is built on Amazon) “Amazon are the major player in the public cloud realm; we have leaned in heavily with them with our architecture. We're built on top of that of it, with their full services catalogue of compute and storage.”
“We’ve enjoyed a great tech relationship, and on the go-to-market side. We're looking forward to doing more in particular with our reselling solution partner community. We have noticed a lot more success when working with the partners to demonstrate how Druva is a great extension of the of AWS ecosystem and provides very clear monetisation opportunities for the our partner.”
“The intention, particularly with the Compass launch and its important programme, is to showcase Druva’s ability to help partners participate in the revenue or in their world-wide margin stream. And so I think those things really help us stand out.”
Following the company’s recent announcement of $130 million in new funding to fuel growth and global expansion, what are the plans?
“We are proud to have some new investors come in. That'll help us fuel our global expansion. What we'll do different is get the megaphone and be louder about our stance and our unique value proposition and how it helps customers -.how partners can leverage their existing skills to rapidly pivot and then participate in an ongoing margin story for delivering those services. We aim to just make the community more aware about what our value differentiation is around.”
Then there is a whole new accreditation program under Compass, providing independent, self-service access for sales based on business outcome learnings for partners, for the customers and for the technicians. It's the architectural side of the solution narrative. "The good news is that this is not a cumbersome process: this is about a 60 to 70 minute learning session. The technicians level is scoped at about two and a half hours and over time we will build in deeper levels of learning there. But to help our partners quickly get up to speed and be effective, this is more than sufficient. We've done a lot of pilot testing to validate that,” he says.
Are there any particular vertical markets Druva is interested in? “In EMEA, we see manufacturing is a big one since they often have highly distributed sites. In the UK market, the NHS is showing some real interest in what our value proposition is together with partners like VMware and AWS. Then there are high tech companies or companies that do a lot of M&A - these matter to us from a vertical privatisation path as well, because they see the value in protecting and governing that data, which are essential to our solution.”
Accredited partners will have unique access to data insights, programmes, and incentives which embodies Druva’s ‘customer first’ culture -- all focused on helping customers transition effectively to the cloud, he concludes
