Cradlepoint Launches MSP Program To Turbocharge Enterprise 5G Adoption

‘Our strategy from a partner program perspective is to really enable our partners to build a profitable and sustainable wireless practice and deliver exceptional experiences to the customers in the way they want to consume Cradlepoint,’ company channel chief Eric Purcell tells CRN.

Ericsson-owned Cradlepoint is zeroing in on MSPs with benefits that better align with the managed services route to market, the company’s channel executives told CRN.

The wireless specialist revealed significant updates to its existing partner program designed to target global MSP businesses, including NetCloud Manager enhancements, an MSP Playbook, and an MSP-only subscription model, Eric Purcell, senior vice president, global partner sales for Cradlepoint, announced during the company’s North American Partner Summit in Austin on Tuesday.

“We’re really doubling down in that part of our go-to-market. We’ve seen many partners really growing their managed services practice … we see that as one of our fastest growth areas and Cradlepoint is built very well and conducive to managed services,” Purcell said.

[Related: How Cradlepoint Catapulted An Agent Into A Winning Business LTE, 5G Provider]

The Boise, Idaho-based company has seen a drastic uptick in interest around enterprise 5G as businesses turn to cellular connectivity options to complement their existing wireless environments and to fulfill new use cases in which existing Wi-Fi solutions fall short, Purcell said.

That interest, he said, is creating a groundswell of opportunity for the channel. “Wireless WAN and 5G in the partner community is where cloud was 5-7 years ago. All of a sudden, partners are seeing the shift in opportunity,” he said. “Our strategy from a partner program perspective is just to really enable our partners to build a profitable and sustainable wireless practice deliver exceptional experiences to the customers in the way they want to consume Cradlepoint. We don’t have a services organization, so we work with our partners as kind of another unique differentiator.”

The MSP arm of Cradlepoint’s existing Partner Program will now include updated Benefits and requirements that align with the MSP practice, such as white glove logistics support and a flexible subscription model and pricelist designed to give MSP partners the ability to better control their customer lifecycles and scale up and down as needed.

The program is about rewarding partners for building out their managed services practices, said Lisa Wight, vice president of global distribution and partner programs for Cradlepoint.

“The piece that I love probably the most is that we’ve listened so closely to MSPs and these hybrid partners to make sure that we have the subscription model that really supports their practice and their business model,” she said.

The program will also include Cradlepoint University Training targeted specifically for the MSP practice and planned, MSP-exclusive enhancements to NetCloud Manager, the company’s cloud management and orchestration platform for wireless WANs. NetCloud Manager, the “heart and soul” of Cradlepoint’s portfolio that’s built on an open architecture, is a great launch point for partners that want to build their managed services practices, Purcell said.

“We’re doing some pretty big shifts from a Netcloud Manager — and even just a simple SKU perspective — in allowing partners to renew and really delight and support their customers,” Wight said.

The MSP Playbook that Cradlepoint is developing is essentially a service creation capability, Purcell said, aimed at helping partners define, develop and launch their offerings based on based on Cradlepoint technology. “It’s really about accelerating that time to market, that time to launch, that time to revenue — [those are] the big things we’re focused on,” he added.

Cradlepoint’s partner program with the new MSP enhancements will launch in Q3 2023, according to the company.