"Supporting our partners as they discuss their customer imperatives in the “new normal” is our core priority"

Kaushal Veluri, Director – Channel Ecosystem, NetApp India

“A few months back, the question on new partner programs would have been answered differently. With the advent of COVID 19, this is a testing time for the entire ecosystem.

As businesses slowly come back to normal over the next few months, cash flow is a significant issue for our partners. To help address these challenges, NetApp is currently extending partner credit terms by 30 days for direct purchasing partners (distributors and direct resellers), extending eligibility for achievement in partner growth programs, delaying our next compliance review by three months and extending all certification expiries by six months.

As we look to the future, supporting our partners as they discuss their customer imperatives in the “new normal” is our core priority.

NetApp’s Partner programs have focussed on three tenets of Simplicity, Acquisition & Knowledge and helping partners with initiatives in alignment with these strategies.

We have made it simpler for our partners to earn the rebates they are eligible for by making the process claimless. This has helped our partners to focus on market outreach and customer acquisition without worrying about missing out on rebates. This simplicity met with great response from our customers.

To help our partners acquire new customers, we expanded our marketing support to help them with their demand generation activities through initiatives like Marketing Concierge where they can seek help to run an integrated marketing campaign. At the same time, we support partners through back end rebates for acquiring new to NetApp customers and competitive customers through our Run-to-NetApp programs.

As we embrace the new normal due to the COVID-19 pandemic, vendors will need to provide customers innovative, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and consume these technologies to meet evolving business requirements.

Achieving this simplicity will be the foundation for companies as they look for growth opportunities in the new world

• Buying patterns are shifting as customers brace themselves for the workload demands on critical applications. The need of the hour is to support remote workers with End-user computing (EUC) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions for wide-scale deployments without sacrificing performance while making data and applications available and ensuring optimal performance.
o With 5G we see AI-driven IoT becoming a reality, edge computing environments are also primed to become even more disruptive than cloud was. In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, maturing AI applications and lower-cost sensors will be leveraged to build compute-intensive edge environments, laying the groundwork for high bandwidth, low latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation
o The adoption of hybrid multicloud as the de-facto architecture for enterprise customers has led to tremendous pressure to modernise the infrastructure and deliver tangible business value around data-intensive applications and workloads
o Hardware-based Composable Architecture will have less short-term potential against commodity hardware and software-based Infrastructure Virtualisation. Majority of organisations that need to transform within 2020 will be best-served by the combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualization and containerisation.

NetApp has always recognized that our success depends on the success of our partners and that we can all accomplish more by working together than we ever could on our own.”