Schneider Electric ‘Evolves’ Partner Program From Volume To Value

‘We made an intentional shift from volume-based revenue focus, into value-based competencies,’ says Schneider Electric’s Eileen Bishop at XChange 2022.

Schneider Electric Monday unveiled its revamped mySchneider IT Partner Program that looks to accelerate partner power services growth and opportunities.

“We made an intentional shift from volume-based revenue focus, into value-based competencies,” said Eileen Bishop, director of channel marketing and strategic execution for Schneider Electric, during the company’s keynote presentation at XChange 2022 today in Denver.

“We also restructured the program to align to business models so that we can better support you as our partner community, depending on how you’re restructuring your businesses,” she said.

The enhanced mySchneider IT Partner Program will help enable partners who want to sell their own service contracts and perform their own maintenance work. The program will also enable partners who want to be their own “service bureau” to monitor their customer sites themselves, Schneider said.

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Schneider More ‘MSP-Centric’

Faisal Ahmed, CEO of Durham, N.C.-based Benchmark Network Solutions, said Schneider Electric is striving to help partners move away from traditional hardware sales and annual contracts into becoming more services-oriented when it comes to IT power infrastructure.

“Everything’s kind of focused now on this: how much is your monthly recurring revenue? So everyone’s going in that direction. For Schneider, a more hardware centric-company, it’s now also moving into that heavy which is good for us,” said Ahmed.

“Because at the end of the day, it’s not just the hardware—but it’s how we manage it and the end result,” Ahmed said. “Schneider has some interesting offerings because they’re trying to make it more MSP-centric. So instead of doing it all themselves, they’re saying, ‘Hey, you partners can do it as well.’ It helps with our services sales.”

New Solution Provider Specializations

The program focuses on unique specializations that will roll out over the next 12 months including specializations for software and services providers as well as data center solution providers.

One new specialization now available for partners is the IT Solution Provider.

The Solution Provider Specialization will include a new data-driven program dashboard to support value-based and data-centric requirements customers are demanding.

Additionally, the new specialization aims to increase profitability. The revamped mySchneider IT Partner Program gives partners access to deal registration discounts that exceed normal discounts provided through the company’s Edge Opportunity Registration Program.

Another key feature in the new specialization is better business-specific tools, where partners have access to new tools such as the Local Edge Configurator, which has configured tens of thousands of solutions within the distributed IT space.

Benchmark’s CEO Ahmed said Schneider is looking to better help partners drive services sales from an end-to-end perspective.

“From our customer perspective, it’s about the end-to-end solution. To them, they look at us as the IT guys,” said Ahmed. “As more and more IT gets outsourced to MSP world, that’s going become more important. … It’s a lot easier for us as a partner to work with vendors like Schneider who offer a more integrated solution.”

XChange 2022 runs from Aug. 21 to Aug. 23.