SnapLogic has outlined ambitious plans to expand its partner network by 50% in the coming year.
The middleware vendor is searching for partners with vertical industry expertise and prior data management and integration experience, as it rolls out its revitalised Partner Connect Program.
“We are looking to add partners. I want to increase our ecosystem by 50% this year, with greater focus in Europe,” said Jason Wakeam, vice president of business development and OEM sales at SnapLogic.
“Over the past year we have seen tremendous growth at SnapLogic – 50% year-on-year. That has led us to expand our partner ecosystem. In Europe, our growth is greater than the rest of the business overall, so I am really looking to expand in Western Europe,” he added.
The UK, France and Germany have been the engine-room of growth for SnapLogic in Europe, however, there is growing interest in the Netherlands and Benelux countries, and an “urgent need for a partner in Belgium right now”, commented Wakeam.
The impact of COVID-19 has driven organisations from all sectors to commence digital transformation projects that look to unlock data from legacy systems, automate business processes and migrate applications and data to the cloud.
“COVID, [which] has led digital transformation to be accelerated across our customer base. We play strongly into that with our enterprise automation approach,” said Wakeam.
However, the vendor is currently prioritising partners that can target clients in the high-tech, healthcare, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and financial sectors.
SnapLogic’s business breaks down into three areas – firstly its Integrated Platform as a Service (iPaaS) offering for core application integration, data integration and API management. Secondly enterprise automation for end-to-end business process orchestration and lastly cloud modernisation for legacy upgrade projects.
According to Wakeam, SnapLogic has made significant investment in partner marketing and digital infrastructure for members of Partner Connect Program to drive market demand. It has also created repeatable solution templates for its consulting partners, “so they can develop industry vertical assets… that provide them with the opportunity to 'value price' their engagements”, commented Wakeam.
“We’ve designed this program to make it easy and effective for our partners to join, get onboarded and trained, collaborate with us, and quickly realise revenue from these growing opportunities,” he added.
The revamped Partner Connect Program has three partnership tiers – registered, advanced, and premier. Registered partnership is an entry point for partners, enabling them to develop and certify their solutions.
The advanced level is for partners, which have built successful integrations with SnapLogic; this tier will give the partners access to the SnapLogic sandbox environment and other resources.
The highest tier is premier, which provides access to additional technical resources and sales and marketing tools and support.
“We’ve designed the Partner Connect Program with a partner-first mentality,” explained Wakeam.
“Our sales team is compensated directly for collaborating with partners, eliminating any chance of channel conflict, and ensuring that our joint end user customers are presented with the strongest, most valuable solutions possible. We aim to make our partners productive, and most importantly, profitable.”
A key selling point for partners – and SnapLogic – is its ‘low code, no code’ approach that accelerates middleware projects. Moving away from the ‘coding- centric’ approach, SnapLogic has created an AI-powered workflow designer, which recommends the next step in the data pipeline.
“When you tell a customer, you can bring them to market with a new capability, 80% faster than they had has previously planned... they are oiften willing to pay for that,” explained Wakeam.
“We are seeing more and more partners take advantage of IRIS, which is our artificial intelligence engine. It becomes more relevant when we start to look at the enterprise automation industry vertical solutions that can be brought to market,” he added.
To support its channel ambitions in Europe, SnapLogic has appointed a channel head for EMEA and is planning to add further headcount as the business grows.
