Crayon Software helping its customers to tread on their digital transformation journey

"As a cloud solution provider, Crayon is helping customers enable their cloud transformation journey and helping them transform digitally by providing various solutions that would give a faster go to market in reaching their desired objectives." 

Rajesh Thadhani, Director – Sales & Services, Crayon Software Experts during an interview with VARINDIA throws some more light on this aspect while also discussing the channel strategy for the company that in a way is adding value to the business -

What will be Crayon Software's channel roadmap & strategy for the remainder of 2019? 

 Our Strategy with partners has always been to co-sell and has been the same over a couple of years. We do not see this changing, as we deliver non- conflicting business value proposition built on true partnership. We go to market together.

There is a co-sell methodology for various types of partners and we understand this really well - Partners who have solution capabilities, partners who do not have solution capabilities, partners who are SAAS providers, partners who are ISVs, partners that are small and the large ones. In other words we are a democracy of partnerships in co selling.

What are the key strategies you have designed to empower the channel community for achieving the business objectives and engaging them for a longer period?

Our partnerships with our channel is over a decade old and the genre comes from erstwhile Kryptos - the Crayon acquisition in 2014. Krypto’s forte was to sell subscription based licensing to partners since 2005 and they were the pioneers in selling Microsoft SPLA,  and the only distributors for selling  the VMware VCPP, RedHat, CCSP, Citrix CSP, Veeam CSP and other cloud provider licensing. The major customer base was Datacenter players, GSIs, Hosters and Resellers. We have strengthened those relations and made new friends too.

We have built the intelligent Cloud platform, which now helps partners in managing their sales and cloud provider lifecycle with Cloud IQ. We also have programs like Empower IQ that keeps our partners abreast of knowledge and portal like Pulse to keep their sales motivated with partner incentives.

How do you choose the right mix of partners for building an effective channel team?

Partners are classified distinctly so it’s not about choosing the right mix of partners to build an effective channel strategy. It’s just about understanding their go-to market and aligning to the co-sell strategy for the specified partner. The various parameters of alignment are however predefined. They consist of understanding if they have an existing IP, what’s their cloud practises, their solution roadmap and area of specialisation and most importantly their Customer Base and Segment where they operate. This is more to align our sales teams, who understand customer behaviours in those segments and also plug the long term Global OEM relationships for partner and mutual benefits, which is again a part of the larger co-sell strategy.

What are the key enterprise IT challenges which Crayon software is trying to address?

Cloud infrastructure has changed the game for every customer and each one is now talking of only one thing “Digital Transformation”. Crayon is well placed here with its co-sell strategy and services. Business demands have increased with customer behaviour. From “Customer is King” the rules have now changed to “Consumer is King.”

As a cloud solution provider, Crayon is helping customers to enable their cloud transformation journey and help them manage the entire lifecycle to transform digitally by providing various solutions that would give our customers a faster goto market in reaching their desired objectives.

We also help ISVs by managing their entire lifecycle in migrating them to the cloud. We run Advisory Workshops, Create Proof of Concept, Optimisation through our services framework and giving them a go to market with our global reach.

Crayon Software had concluded the 4 city EXCELLERATE Series for Partners. How organizing such events help in positioning the company in driving the digital transformation journey of its customers?

The partner summits were a substantiation of the prowess we have built in the partner ecosystem. The trust, credibility, integrity we have built with our partners coupled with the support and lifecycle management we do for them and their customers will only see this relationship getting stronger and mutually beneficial.
The response from the partner community was an uptick. The 4 city Crayon Excellerate Partner Summits offered actionable takeaways and empowered partners to embrace the digital transformation technologies, thus enabling partners to help their customers to be ready for today, tomorrow and the future of digital transformation.

What steps are you planning on taking to tap the growing need of efficiency?

While cloud is a boon for business, it could also become extremely expensive if not optimised. Crayon’s Software & Cloud analytics team is geared to help customers drive consumption and keep it under control. Customers save large sums of dollars working along the way. Crayon helps optimise your infrastructure and improves cloud performance to plan for future growth efficiently and effectively.