AppDynamics Launches Channel Effort For Its Cloud Management Software

While AppDynamics already has a handful of channel partners in Europe, the company is ramping up its channel efforts in the U.S. this year with channel efforts in the Asia-Pacific region to follow. “We’re looking to put some weight behind the program here in the U.S.,” said Frank Swain, vice president of worldwide sales, who is overseeing AppDynamics’ channel efforts.

AppDynamics’ pitch is that traditional application performance management tools were designed for managing software within an organization’s data center and aren’t capable of managing combinations of complex, distributed applications running inside the firewall and in the cloud.

The AppDynamics toolset helps businesses manage applications running in physical, virtual and cloud environments. It offers capabilities for monitoring and managing distributed Java and .Net applications, including cloud orchestration, application mapping, transaction flow monitoring and code-level diagnostics. It also helps businesses manage cloud application capacity, supplying more IT resources as application usage increases -- “cloud bursting,” the company calls it.

Under the new strategic partner program, resellers will be offered revenue-related discounts, technical training and certification, co-operative marketing and sales support, and lead-generation assistance, among other programs and incentives.

AppDynamics sells “standard” and “cloud” editions of its product (the latter adds cloud orchestration capabilities). Both can be deployed on-premise or customers can subscribe to an on-demand version -- and channel partners can resell and implement all versions, according to Swain.

The AppDynamics technology offers resellers the opportunity to expand into cloud computing consulting and help clients develop a cloud computing strategy. VARs are playing a big role in that,” Swain said.

On May 10, in an effort to seed the market and build brand awareness, AppDynamics made a free “lite” version of its software available. So far more than 900 copies of that product have been downloaded. While AppDynamics Lite’s capabilities are largely limited to IT troubleshooting and diagnosing application performance problems, marketing vice president Steve Roop said the free software -- which can be installed in two minutes -- provides 80 percent of the functionality of competing products from CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Downloads of the lite version of AppDynamics also provide leads for the vendor’s commercial editions and Swain said the company will forward many of those to VARs. Resellers also can use the lite edition for product demonstration, he said.

Partners will have to be certified by AppDynamics as having “deep expertise” working in Java and .Net environments, according to the company’s announcement. “Experience selling performance management solutions is definitely a plus,” Swain said.

To avoid channel conflict, Swain said the company’s compensation plan for its sales force is “channel-neutral” and the vendor is providing incentives for sales representatives to work with resellers.

AppDynamics also is launching an ecosystem alliance partner program for companies that develop products that work with its application performance management software, and a cloud platform partner program for companies that provide cloud application hosting services and dynamic compute capacity services.

European solution providers in Europe who resell AppDynamics include Benzler in Sweden, Tools2Perform in the Benelux countries, Application Performance in the U.K. and Code Centric in Germany.