Racemi Goes 'All-In' On The Channel With New Partner Program

Cloud migration technology vendor Racemi, led by a new CEO, went all-in on a channel strategy Wednesday with the launch of its first formal partner program.

"We looked hard at what we thought was the best path for success and determined it was in our best interest and the ecosystem's best interest to focus on a channel-first strategy," Racemi CEO Steven Horwitz, who started with the company earlier this year, told CRN.

Managed hosting companies and systems integrators "are close to clients and they have a vested interest in the endgame to get those workloads in the cloud," Horwitz said.

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Atlanta-based Racemi, a close partner of Amazon Web Services has been selling migration software for a decade, focusing on secure, policy-based solutions for enterprises. The company has seen a strong shift in sentiment among those large businesses over the last 18 months, according to its CEO.

"Certain organizations that were reticent to make the pivot from on-prem to public cloud now said they had to make that happen," Horwitz told CRN.

At the same time, "enterprise migration is still very much in its early stages and utilization of public cloud has been more around greenfield apps," he said. Most consultants are focused on rewriting and re-platforming apps, but lack advanced migration skills.

Racemi developed a series of discovery, migration and workload optimization tools "easily consumable within a partner's line card," Horwitz said. Those new SKUs were the genesis of a pivot over the last half year culminating in the channel program introduction.

Under the new program, partners can select from five different pricing bundles to meet customer demand at an affordable price, he said. Fixed-price migration services will start at $675 per workload.

Partners will be rewarded for reaching enablement goals or sales volumes with higher margins on those deals, Horwitz told CRN.

The company has long worked with systems integrators, but engagements were opportunistic. By defining competencies, methodologies and processes, the new program will formalize and solidify those relationships, he said.

Racemi plans to drive all its business through the channel; a year ago, less than half of its revenue was sourced from partners, the CEO said.

The company is hoping to sign 15 partners by the end of the year; not just systems integrators of the type it has worked with in the past, but also hybrid hosting providers and MSPs.

"The channel is a more-efficient model," Horwitz told CRN. "Most of the partners we're targeting have established relationships with clients' sales and delivery organizations."