AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco focused on application performance management (APM), has added a Pioneer level that makes available various sales and support services to smaller partners focused on innovative applications to its Titan channel program.
The goal is to make dedicated channel account and sales engineering support available to partners that would not normally qualify for them based on sales volume, says Ghazal Asif, vice president of worldwide channels for AppDynamics.
A team of channel AppDynamics channel executives will evaluate partners to determine eligibility for participating in the Pioneer program, says Asif.
Partner participating in the Pioneers program will also gain access to customized, training and enablement programs as part of an effort to create sales and pre-sales champions that have a deep technical understanding of AppDynamics. There is also an AppDynamics Certified Implementation Practitioner course being made available as well.
AppDynamics will also develop a joint business plan with Pioneer partners. Channel partners participating in the program will be invited to take part in two planning sessions a year to align goals.
“We want to invest in them,” says Asif.
Each year partners participating in the Pioneers program will then be reevaluated to determine if they are ready to join in the AppDynamics program at another tier level, says Asif.
In effect, AppDynamics is now offering many of the same benefits it provides its best partners to a class of partners that it wants to groom. Competition across the APM space is already fierce. Working closely with Pioneer partners creates an opportunity for AppDynamics to embed its APM agent software that connects back to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application in emerging application workloads.
Historically, the biggest challenge facing AppDynamics has been convincing customers to apply APM more broadly. The number of applications being actively monitored is still a single-digit percentage of the total number of applications deployed. Cisco has previously made it clear it views AppDynamics as part of a larger software strategy anchored around providing a variety of cloud services.
The Pioneer program isn’t designed to give one partner a pricing edge over another. But it does make it clear, that in the wake of being acquired by Cisco last year, there’s now a lot more focus at AppDynamics on the role channel partners can play in expanding the total size of the available APM market.
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