Chef, a provider of IT automation tools, this week announced a revamped three-tier channel program as part of an effort to expand the base of partners that have DevOps expertise.
DevOps is a methodology for programmatically building and deploying applications faster by leveraging application programming interfaces (APIs) and IT automation frameworks as an alternative to highly structured ITIL frameworks that rely mainly on job tickets to manage IT processes.
Chef right now has about 500 people participating in its channel program, most of which represent smaller partners that were born of the cloud, says Vikram Ghosh, vice president of business development for Chef.
“Most of our partners grew up with the DevOps movement,” says Ghosh.
However, as DevOps processes become more widely embraced by IT organizations there are now many larger system integrators and value-added resellers starting to build DevOps practices, notes Ghosh.
In addition, Ghosh says Chef expects to see more partners rolling out managed DevOps services in 2020 as well.
Since altering its business model last year around providing services for open source software, Ghosh says it’s now become simpler for Chef to align its economic interests with partners building DevOps practices through which Chef provides complementary support services for the open source software it provides.
In addition, it makes it easier for Chef to work with channel partners that might only be interested in, for example, ChefInspec, a tool for automating compliance management.
The Chef channel program now consists of Principal, Senior and Junior tiers. Each tire revolves around a co-selling incentive and full-margin recurring revenue model designed to allow partners to grow their share-of-wallet within customers and own the complete customer lifecycle, says Ghosh.
Chef will also provide co-marketing along with sales and technical enablement tools and programs. Channel partners will also gain access to Chef Not-for-Resale licenses that enable partners to drive trials and use Chef’s binaries within their own internal IT environments.
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