Palo Alto Networks invests lot of time listening to its partner's feedback and understands their needs

Harpreet Bhatia, Director, Channels & Strategic Alliances – India & SAARC at Palo Alto Networks

Need of a Partner Programme 

A robust partner program will focus on providing ample learning and earning opportunities to partners so that they can expand market coverage and in the process, enhance their own capability and capacity to fuel further growth. As an organization comes out with innovative solutions to meet customers’ business needs, they depend more and more on partners to take these innovations to their customers, with speed and agility. The organization also needs to take into account that the solutions built by them are deployed, implemented and integrated in the customer’s infrastructure in exactly the same way as the use case they were envisaged to solve.

Importance of a Partner Programme 

Palo Alto Networks invests a lot of time listening to our partner’s feedback and understanding their needs. Partner voice is captured by participation in internal as well as external industry surveys, multiple partner leadership platforms and Partner Advisory Councils across the territories we operate in.

 While our industry leading partner program called the Nextwave partner program remains the same, we try and bring innovation and enhancements to the program every year, depending on the changing technology trends, consumption patterns and addition of new routes to market. Our Nextwave partner program acknowledges and rewards partners for their investment with us and gives a greater ROI as you enhance the partner tier levels.  

Main Concerns to Address:

There are 3 pillars that we focus on in our Partner Program Design:

INCREASING Profitability Initiatives: some examples of what we have introduced are New Partner Value Incentives, Referral and Rebate Programs.

ENABLING New Services Opportunities: we have introduced QuickStart Service SKUs, Transformational Services Practice and a Dedicated Managed Services Program.

OPTIMIZING Processes & Systems: we have introduced Deal Approval Automation, Deal Quoting Automation and Order Placement Automation.