Eaton’s PowerAdvantage Partner Program: A Game Changer For IT resellers And MSPs

The excitement surrounding Eaton’s newly revamped partner program is hard to miss, with managed service providers already reaping the benefits. Packed with advanced tools and resources, Eaton’s PowerAdvantage Partner Program is helping MSPs elevate businesses to new levels.

In an exclusive interview with CRNtv Host Sydney Neely, Steve Loeb, vice president of distributed sales infrastructure sales with Eaton, shares more about these exciting developments.

Sydney: Eaton recently made some big changes to the PowerAdvantage Partner Program that took effect in May. Can you tell us what’s new and what kind of feedback you have received from partners?

Steve: We were focused on making sure that the tiers that we have are meaningful, they provide the support that our partners need, and they're able to access them on a broader scale from previous years. We've expanded our dealer registration discounts across our product categories. Whereas before we only had some of our categories in there. We've also added new alliance partnerships, so if our partner organizations are selling Nutanix or Scale or Hyper-V, they now can access some additional powered by Eaton discounts.

We've provided access to our enhanced rewards program and increased broader access to our marketing development funds, which most of our partners have had access to, but have not been able to really scale with us as their businesses have scaled.

Sydney: Looking ahead, where do you see the most potential growth for Eaton, and how can MSPs make the most of these opportunities?

Steve: We've seen a seismic shift in the virtualization community, which many of our MSP partners are at the core. As they’re engaging with core partners, like Nutanix and Scale and Hyper-V, we've been able to now not only integrate our power products and our solutions with those platforms, but also enhance that with our deal registration program and alliance partnership discounts to not only provide the technical side, but also the commercial side, creating a win-win situation for our organizations.

Sydney: Let’s switch gears a bit and talk about trends. AI is a huge topic right now. How is Eaton supporting its partners to get AI solutions up and running today?

Steve: What we've seen in that space really is around edge AI the aspects of machine learning, closer to the edge to try to compute high volumes of data brought in by IoT devices. What you would traditionally see in the edge networking applications or edge compute applications is that the power density is just higher, the need to integrate these solutions is much higher.

As a power manufacturing company, we have been around for a long time and none of that technology that's super interesting to talk about right now, really works if it's not powered. We have kind of the broadest portfolio, physical infrastructure and connectivity solutions, for our partner network to leverage as they are in those conversations today.

Sydney: Can you tell us what additional resources or programs are available to help partners continue to thrive?

Steve: Eaton this year won in the power management category for the CRN ARC Award, which we're super proud of. It's a true reflection of kind of our commitment to our partners and their response to that commitment, nationally and in scale of our channel marketing and channel sales organizations.

Those team members are out there hustling for our partners every day to leverage our marketing, investment capabilities, our pre-sales solution architect and engineering resources, and our in-territory end user demand creation resources. Our verticalized specialists are all oriented towards making sure that we're driving meaningful growth for our partners in the community and in the marketplace out there today.

For more information on Eaton and their PowerAdvantage Partner Program, visit PowerAdvantage.Eaton.com/CRN.