Kemp this week announced it had enhanced the channel program it built around a family of application delivery controllers (ADCs) to provide more flexible consumption models along with a set of tools to evaluate the total cost of ownership for each model.
In addition, Kemp announced it had extended its technology partnerships to now include Advanced Tier status for VMware on AWS, Select status for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), and Advanced Tier for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Finally, Kemp also announced it is now arming partners with additional sales and marketing tools, customer assessment tools designed specifically to address load balancing issues, increased margins and incentives, and training resources.
The more flexible pricing spanning perpetual, subscription and metered models are intended to help channel partners evolve in a cloud age where customers want to be able to pay for software based on usage, says Kemp CEO Ray Downes. That shift has required channel partners to change their business models in a way that Kemp wants to ensure remains profitable for partners, adds Downes.
“The channel has had to evolve,” says Downes.
Kemp provides a series of virtual and physical ADC appliances that can be integrated with multiple types of load balancers running on-premises or in the cloud. To make it simpler to manage the deployment of distributed applications at scale, Kemp this week also announced it has begun to infuse its ADCs with predictive analytics capabilities.
Competition across the ADC sector is already fierce. A recent report from ZK Research found that among 1,000 enterprise survey respondents, a full 70 percent wanted to replace their current ADC vendor because of issues such as vendor lock-in, pricing, and unnecessary complexity. Kemp claims it now has more than 25,000 customers and 60,000 application deployments in 115 countries.
The next big ADC opportunity will be driven by the emergence of applications based on microservices. Rather than deploying a single ADC to balance multiple applications trying to share the same IT infrastructure, next-generation applications will each require their own ADC to manage how the access highly distributed infrastructure resources, notes Downes. That approach will naturally require more flexible approaches to licensing ADC software. The challenge and the opportunity facing channel partners now is to make sure they have both the skills and business model needed to stay relevant as that transition occurs.
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