SolarWinds Enhances Partner Program, Moves Toward The Cloud With New SaaS Opportunities

‘The SaaS opportunity is huge. And that opens a whole new avenue for us to new customers who were born in the cloud and only want to use the cloud. We haven’t been there before. But we are now,’ says Chad Reese, SolarWinds president of sales and global channel chief.

Observability and IT management software developer SolarWinds Wednesday unveiled a major update to its Transform Partner Program, looking to make it easier for its solution providers to qualify for its upper tiers and access the benefits associated with them.

The Transform Partner Program, which rolled out last October, showed the importance of the channel to SolarWinds, which now has a global channel-first policy, said Chad Reese, president of sales and global channel chief of the Austin, Texas-based company.

“This year, the intent is really to bring the program to the next level,” Reese told CRN. “So more benefits to our tiered partners including distributors, GSIs [global systems integrators], MSPs and hyperscalers. New programmatic rebates for the top tiers, new targets for those tiered partners. And on an international level, we’re offering the same targets, tiers and so on.”

[Related: SolarWinds Execs Receive SEC Wells Notice Related To ‘Sunburst’ Cyberattack]

SolarWinds’ new program is also an opportunity to give its partners more flexibility, Reese said.

“For instance, partners will get the ability to achieve their targets within six months, not within a quarter,” he said. “So theoretically, you could have an off quarter but still make your half with good growth rates. Deals sometimes happen and sometimes don’t happen within a given quarter. So that was a big change.”

SolarWinds also re-evaluated partners and their tiers within the program based on how much business they are doing and how they are investing in the company, Reese said. The company has between 185 and 200 partners in its top three tiers who are getting the majority of its partner investment, along with thousands of “authorized”-level partners who focus primarily on transactional business, he said.

“But we also are putting a lot of focus on our lowest level, the ‘authorized’ tier, because we’re constantly looking at how can we grow and develop that group to be able to move up into higher tiers,” he said.

SolarWinds is using its updated Transform Partner Program to help its authorized partners move into an upper tier with a combination of upcoming certifications and offering to help with skills and joint business plans, Reese said.

“There’s a lot of different things, but our ultimate goal is how do we help partners grow their skills and enable SolarWinds to be successful for them and help drive customer success?” he said.

Another major change is the addition of a new acceleration program aimed at helping channel partners get certifications around four key SolarWinds offerings, including database, IT service management, its SaaS-based hybrid cloud observability, and SolarWinds observability, Reese said.

Ultimately, the SolarWinds Transform Partner Program means big opportunity for partners, Reese said.

“We have 300,000 customers globally,” he said. “I think we work with 96 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and have a 94 percent renewal rate across our customer set, which is pretty much unheard of in the industry. And so we have a great opportunity, not just for our company as a whole, but for our partners as well, to grow into these new solution areas.”

SolarWinds is also moving more toward the cloud with SaaS opportunities it previously had not had, Reese said.

“The SaaS opportunity is huge,” he said. “And that opens a whole new avenue for us to new customers who were born in the cloud and only want to use the cloud. We haven’t been there before. But we are now.”

Indirect channels for SolarWinds in most international geographies is a very large part of the company’s business but has not been as strong in North America, Reese said.

“We’re working in general to continue to improve that,” he said. “And we are looking at how we drive channel-first, meaning if a partner is involved they’re adding value. Deals should go through partners. We want to enable our partners to make this a channel-led business, helping them start to drive an autonomous business, which means they want to sell SolarWinds and they’re motivated to do so. And we’re supporting them every way we possibly can to help them be successful.”

Aswin Kumar, senior director and global head of observability products for India-based Infosys, told CRN he has been working with SolarWinds for about three years and has seen it become an increasingly important partner for observability.

“SolarWinds has traditionally been more focused on network monitoring solutions, and they are now transforming as we speak to focus on overall observability, which is not only network but also servers, app plugins, and more,” Kumar said. “So SolarWinds is at a very interesting point where the market is also ready for full-stack observability.”

Kumar said he is happy that SolarWinds is making a push to the SaaS side of observability.

“They have launched their technology, but they are still focused on on-premises solutions,” he said. “And that SaaS solution has to grow and the market has to show that it is being implemented.”

SolarWinds has proven itself to be a good partner, Kumar said. While the company still needs time to provide support in terms of market intelligence and related backup support, the company has been strong on the procurement side with prompt response to pricing and other details, he said.

“SolarWinds is working with us very closely and updating us as it building generative AI and other futuristic solutions and involving us in that,” he said. “We want to become a close partner and privy to the early access to the technology. We also want to become part of SolarWinds’ road map council or governance council or partner council and work very closely in shaping their road map.”