Partners are the backbone of NetApp’s business 

Ganesan Arumugam, Director - Channel Partners, NetApp India  

“NetApp is well positioned to drive a partner's transformation to service led, solutions focused organisation to address their enterprises and accelerate cloud adoption with the NetApp Partner Sphere Program. The program is cloud-focused and services-led, which offers a versatile and adaptable approach to growth for all types of sales. It comprises a simple framework that supports each partner’s unique go-to-market strategy, providing flexibility and automation to ease partner processes, and consistency for all partners and sales motions from a single program with clear tiers and objectives. By consolidating multiple programs into one, it simplifies the process for all partner types, business models, and routes to market. 

We have inducted a few of our partners to our advisory board, to help us better understand the on-ground needs of customers. During our partner summit last year, we leveraged this as a means of collecting feedback from them. We then take this feedback to our global team, which enables us to refine our offerings. Our regular review meetings with partners helps to receive feedback and inputs, which are incorporated in our partner program. The NetApp Partner Sphere Program has been designed to provide comprehensive training and support. This helps partners in building their service capabilities on specific solution areas to allow them to succeed in a highly competitive hybrid cloud market. In addition, the program's simplified and flexible tiering system has been designed based on objective thresholds that they can follow- from Approved to Preferred, to Prestige, and finally, to Prestige Plus.”