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Techaisle Blog

Insightful research, flexible data, and deep analysis by a global SMB IT Market Research and Industry Analyst organization dedicated to tracking the Future of SMBs and Channels.
Anurag Agrawal

Red Hat Partner Program accelerating partner business velocity

Markets behave logically, and therefore channel partners exist for logical reasons. Channel partners are essential to intercepting demand, connecting technology to business outcomes, enabling efficiencies, and providing customer relevance. A sizable majority of IT industry sales are concluded through partners and are not likely to slow down soon. As we emerge from the pandemic, it is clear that the cloud has transformed the IT industry by its ability to provide agile transformation, resiliency, and adaptability. The market has shifted from discrete purchase-and-deploy deals aligned with refresh cycles to a 'hybrid IT' approach that blends a limited number of on-premise assets with a growing range of on-demand services. Application modernization, migration, cloud consulting services, and cloud managed services. Containers have become the PoC beachheads, small to enterprise firms are building the Edge. Techaisle data shows that the need for updated understandings of channel management imperatives has expanded beyond the tactical questions of sales or management metrics or marketing activities. There is a reason why I have written a long preamble before unfolding the main point of the Techaisle Take.

Red Hat is a platform company whose goal is to continue to deliver platforms and the relevant pieces around it that enable a customer to have the maximum flexibility and core capabilities for security, stability, and resiliency. In addition, these customers should be able to deploy applications faster and at scale. Therefore, its open hybrid cloud initiative has to have as broad a partner ecosystem as possible to deliver on Red Hat's promise. Red Hat is still Red Hat retaining its independence and neutrality, but its partner program is changing to tackle the ecosystem challenges. Red Hat has been listening to its partners. Red Hat's Stefanie Chiras, Sr. Vice-President, Partner Ecosystem Success is focusing on partner success. She and her team recognize that partners contribute to creating, shaping, defining demand – in some cases by making customers aware of a new category or product, in others by helping to define solution requirements or specifications. In the hybrid world, the solution deployment is based not on a specified hardware/software configuration but the orchestration of multiple on-demand services integrated with existing legacy systems - a liberating factor for the partner ecosystem in a meaningful sense.

Anurag Agrawal

Five9 driving customer experience solution success with a thoughtful and collaborative global partner program

Survival of every business depends upon customers, and 2020 saw a ground-breaking year when customer intimacy (acquisition, retention, experience & satisfaction) drove technology adoption and business process evolution within the SMB and midmarket segments. Businesses in general, and SMBs in particular, have many poorly automated or un-automated tasks and processes that they could meaningfully improve by using focused SaaS applications. 59% of small businesses, 86% of core midmarket firms, and 95% have prioritized customer experience solution deployment. Still, IT staff within 38% of small businesses, 47% of core midmarket firms, and 55% of upper midmarket firms face challenges in deploying customer experience solutions.

Five9, a cloud contact center software provider, aims to lessen the IT challenge by “reimagining customer experience” through fully customizable solutions that empower customer agents to address customer needs. Deploying customer intimacy is a little bit like making Baked Alaska: the promise is delicious, but the method is mysterious. The journey from IT systems to a better customer experience isn’t a matter of magical alchemy that wreathes unlikely ingredients with an alluring halo. Instead, it results from a roadmap that starts with digitizing data and processes, moves forward through connected systems that encourage and support fact-based customer-facing activity, and result in an organizational capacity to understand and respond to customer needs. Midmarket businesses understand the appeal of the outcome – and they need guidance from suppliers like Five9 that can define the recipe for customer experience.

Five9 knows that contact center software is only one component of a set of sales, marketing, and customer service solutions. It knows that, with customer experience, it’s the mystery of how to aggregate data and integrate it with customer-facing activities successfully. Recent global SMB and midmarket research from Techaisle shows that within US small businesses, customer-focused SaaS business application adoption increased by 49% in 2020 and will rise by another 33% in 2021. Techaisle data shows that by the end of 2021, 76% of new SaaS adoption within SMBs will be customer-focused. Similarly, within the US midmarket firms, the adoption reached 82% in 2020, with 74% planning to add adjacent customer-focused applications in 2021. Europe research shows similar trends. To deliver on the promise of “reimagining customer experience,” extending the functionality of its solutions, and automating entire customer-facing business processes, Five9’s software must integrate with CRM, online retail, automated quoting, eCommerce, social chatbots, email, forms management, help desk, and queue management.

Integration is a crucial impediment to customer experience. Executives often see examples of organizations using data drawn from integrated internal systems, or from social media, from far-flung sensors, or third-party services, or from a mix of all of these sources – to improve the critical operating parameters of their businesses. However, these answers aren’t simply a result of having technology within an organization. Instead, better customer experience results from linking technology (and the data it collects, shares, and enhances) with front-line functions, which requires understanding how to develop technical competencies and integrate them within the organization.

Five9 has identified several partner types, especially CRM solution providers, UC suppliers, and ISVs, to deliver an integrated customer experience solution. Five9 has built an adapter to enable clients of all sizes to seamlessly integrate its CTI with CRM solutions such as Kustomer, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite CRM, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.

For the CRM solutions providers, Five9 follows three distinct engagement models, each of which can establish Five9 and its partners as a partner of the customer, invested in their business success. At the same time, if executed correctly, the models enhance the revenue stream of Five9 and its partners.

  • Sell into the customers who are already using CRM solutions from one of the Five9 integration partners
  • CRM solution providers get introduced to the Five9 installed base to help with total CX transformation
  • Joint selling into new customer accounts who are evaluating CRM and contact center solutions

The above is not a simple, straightforward set of changes to embrace. However, the changes are central to transitioning to where the opportunity is growing – and this, more than any adherence to tried and true practices, is the goal to position its businesses for long-term viability. The nature of the partner relationship is a critical determinant of Five9 success. From a strategic sales enablement perspective, Five9 is focused on alignment with its sales team to create a better system by educating its sales team on the benefits of selling together with its CRM partners.

Unified communications is another technology area where most SMBs and midmarket firms have high planned adoption rates. However, the inhibitor is the inability of a hosted solution to adequately meet the needs of an SMB organization which demands many feature sets - call hand-off, integration with CRM solutions, integration of vertical applications, group calling/directory, and regulatory compliance. To enable such features necessitates customization or integration expenses which wipes out the cost savings. Five9 has partnered with Nextiva, Microsoft Teams, fuze, Zoom, TetraVX, and Mitel to integrate contact center and back-office, which augments the telephony and conferencing solutions to enable agents to be more efficient in solving a customer problem. Since many UC suppliers work with resellers as well, Five9 has aligned its partner program to understand how to build complementary routes to market options to capture as much market share together as possible.

ISVs are essential to cloud suppliers serving all types of customers. For example, cloud vendors, such as Five9, looking to build an enterprise-level platform need ISVs to provide critical capabilities to the core offering. In addition, vendors attempting to penetrate target markets work with a specific application vendor to demonstrate the relevance of their services; the ISV, in turn, relies on the platform vendor to provide evidence of a trustworthy application delivery platform. And cloud solution suppliers may position cloud applications as an extension of their core relationship with a customer, even as the ISV involved views them as a resale channel with excellent access to a high-value target buyer community.

Five9 has a formal ISV partner program with co-sell agreements, provides development support and accreditation, and promotes ISV solutions via Five9 CX Marketplace. Five9 already has 70+ ISVs in its program. These ISVs get access to the development environment, documentation, APIs, and SDKs to build integrations. Once the ISVs have built their integrations, they get accredited, and solutions get listed on Five9’s marketplace. To drive success, Five9 has a two-way referral initiative along with a co-sell motion. As a result, the program is growing every quarter, with an increasing number of partners wanting to partner with Five9.

Five9 is anchoring its global partner program on white-glove service, empowering partners, certifications, and development support. This year, Five9 is moving to target the right partners and provide new and improved professional certification options. It is also focusing on specific routes to market around certifications. In Five9’s own words, “…our special sauce is aligning with the Five9 sales team, demonstrating value, building mutual interest and trust, through initiatives such internal newsletter.” Partner Loop, a monthly newsletter, keeps all of Five9’s salespeople in the loop on sales wins, resources, all the great things happening with the partners, and why they should continue to win together with the partners. In addition, to accelerate time to market for its sales teams, Five9 has a partner locator, partner profiles, and CRM and UC integration guides to reduce the complexity of sales conversations. Partner Hello is an onboarding and activation concept that is seeing tremendous success and driving engagement. Five9’s amplify education webinar series provides training to its partners on new services and products. Five9 is addressing essential partner requirements. Techaisle partner survey shows that onboarding training and webinars are the two most crucial training options for partners with certification programs and web training modules representing the next-most important training options

To top it all, Five9 has also launched its Five 9 Global Partner Advisory Board and new Five9 Partner Hello Onboard and Welcome Guide in June.

Modern IT generally delivers systems that improve sales process efficiency and visibility. The drive to develop new customers and retain existing ones directly impacts the desire to emphasize solutions that support business growth, including social media, mobility, and analytics. Additionally, growing business confidence affects all business-relevant solution areas, freeing up resources for new solution exploration, adoption, and optimizing or redesigning business processes. Besides pure SaaS business applications, including cloud solutions, analytics, marketing automation, customer service, CRM, and other adjacent solutions, data shows that SMBs are planning to increase spending in AI, Chatbots, voice assistants, UCaaS, and mobility solutions.

Five9 is positioning itself to be a key player in the customer experience solution segment by successfully embracing an industry-wide trend away from rigid solution definition towards fluid, flexible configurations that integrate multiple components and moving from opportunistic to strategic. In addition, it is accelerating collaboration across partners for predictable, rapid responses to customer demands, becoming proactive in building effective relationships with trusted allies.

Anurag Agrawal

Mission, Migration, and Modernization – three pillars of AWS Partner Program

There is no doubt that Amazon AWS has been a cloud leader since 2006. Channel partners are an essential cog in the wheel of success. The AWS Partner Network (APN) is the umbrella under which its global community of partners builds solutions and services for their customers. Over the years, APN has evolved to include an MSP program, distribution program, marketplace channel program, and partner transformation program, amongst many others. Despite the evolution, AWS is not particularly well-known for its partner program, except if the partner is a significant consulting partner such as Accenture, Deloitte, Mphasis, and several others or a technology partner of size, stature, and brand recognition. However, the AWS Partner Network (APN) does include more than 100,000 Partners from more than 150 countries, with almost 70% headquartered outside of the US.

Over the last decade, there has been an industry-wide change in engagement models to support smaller channel partners. Except for top-tier partners, vendors have distanced themselves from direct oversight of channel marketing initiatives, relying on distributors to manage market development resources. The changes have made it more difficult for channel organizations to maintain predictable operational arcs. They have also made it more difficult for vendors to build and nurture high-performance partner networks. As a result, almost every week, we field two questions from the channel partner community. 1/ Does AWS have a partner program for the midsized to smaller partners? 2/ How does its program differ from Microsoft's (and increasingly from Google Cloud) channel partner initiatives?

The questions and reality are on parallel tracks. The overwhelming majority of AWS partners are smaller businesses. AWS has intentionally designed the entry point of its programs to be inclusive of small businesses. For example, consulting or SI partners only need four trained employees, two certified employees, and three engagements with customers. ISVs only need to complete a Foundational Technical Review.

Sandy Carter, Vice President of worldwide public sector partners and programs at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is transforming the program to be inclusive and diversified, at least for the partners focused on the worldwide public sector – government, healthcare, education, not-for-profit, space, federal financials, and energy. Mission, modernization, and migration are the three pillars of partner enablement and empowerment. Mission is not about simply migrating something over or performing an IT function; it is about delivering a business value for the organization, agency, state, or country. There are many examples, such as digitizing a hospital, leveraging supply chain technology to get food to the right place, or leveraging AWS technology to deliver vaccines. Modernization for AWS is about using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT. Finally, migration is more wide-ranging than the other two, with three converging tracks – application migration, mainframe migration, and data-led migration.

Research You Can Rely On | Analysis You Can Act Upon

Techaisle - TA