Puppet Pitches Partner Program: We ‘Wanted To Make It Simple’

‘We’re making sure that everyone has what they need at their fingertips,’ says Leslie Lorenco, global director of channel sales at Puppet. ‘If you‘re going to invest the time in us, we want to make sure you have the resources to be successful.’

IT infrastructure automation firm Puppet launched its new partner program this week that empowers their 200 global partners to up their game in the channel.

“With the new partner program, we essentially wanted to make it simple,” Leslie Lorenco, global director of channel sales at Puppet, told CRN. “It was really complicated and really hard to understand for partners and for us internally. It was really important that we made it simple and we set a strong foundation for going forward.”

The partner program offers a variety of benefits such as marketing demand funds (MDF), co-branded content, training, resources, access to the Portland, Oregon-based Puppet team and enablement for their partners.

“We’re making sure that everyone has what they need at their fingertips,” she said. “If you're going to invest the time in us, we want to make sure you have the resources to be successful.”

The partner program is a competency-based program that enables partners to act on behalf of Puppet to meet the needs of their shared customers. In turn, Puppet can leverage partnerships with unique competencies or specializations to extend its sales, engineering, and services teams.

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Puppet is a very complex technology, Lorenco said, so it’s important for the company to look for partners who have the technical skill sets as well as the ability to properly articulate what's going on in some of the most complicated infrastructures in the world.

“By leaning into that, and really rewarding partners who have those skill sets, we're looking to hopefully expand our reach with our customer base,” she said. “It really is a single source of truth for all of our partner needs.”

Puppet is also holding its first ever partner conference in March. The virtual program will cover the new partner program as well as new features it will roll out in the future.

As enterprises grow their digital footprint and adopt hybrid, multi-cloud strategies, they also introduce the potential for vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure. Puppet and its partners help those companies prioritize the security and compliance of their ever-evolving IT ecosystem, safeguarding critical infrastructure and applications.

One of the unique things about Puppet, she said, is that partners can double down on where they've already invested in and then add and augment puppet into their systems to help bring those investments to the next level.