Autodesk connects its success to its partners’ success

Alok Sharma
Country Manager – India & SAARC (Channels), Autodesk

“At Autodesk, the Partner program is called the Autodesk Partner Advantage Program, which includes tiering (Platinum, Gold, & Resellers), vertical specializations (eg AEC, Design & MFG, Media & Entertainment, CAM, ACS, etc), and Strategic Investment Program (SIP) – our investments and reward program.

Rewards & Rebates for Autodesk Partners

We are committed to our partners, with a focus on moving to subscription, which would create a more resilient business and even during the global pandemic we saw that promise realized. Autodesk’s success is connected to our partner success, therefore we continue to invest in our partner ecosystem.

We aspire to provide meaningful rewards for partners delivering desired customer outcomes. CDP (Channel development Program) and MDP (Market Development Program) are integral parts of the Autodesk Partner Advantage program. Apart from this, there is significant investment from Autodesk to enable the partner eco-system to deliver customer based outcomes.

For backend incentives, we have the inflection point model which allows us to give partners predictable scaling pay-outs depending on where they are against their quarterly target. In view of the difficult conditions the global pandemic created, we pulled together a core team to support our partners through these challenging times. This was done by introducing our partner business continuity program which we tweaked with quarterly updates to our global framework and incentives.  As we look further out to FY23 and beyond we will continue to prioritize investment by finding ways to recognize and reward value, along with acknowledgement of year on year performance through growth, specifically focusing on the development of high value services for our partners as more workloads migrate from the desktop to the cloud.

We have also refined our partner Advantage program. Last fiscal year we went through a significant evolution of our partner program. Based on feedback from our partner community, we eliminated differentiated pay outs for both new and renewed transactions. We also removed minimum purchase requirements from the specialization framework completely. We want our partners to deliver services for business outcomes to their customers, be committed to their customers and realize a return on their investment with Autodesk solutions.”