Stratus Technologies, a provider of high-availability platforms, this week revamped its channel program as part of an effort to reward its best partners with access to additional tools and financial rewards in return for registering deals.
The company will also provide partners with certified integrations as well as access to bundles of Stratus platforms in addition to promoting the services of partners with demonstrated Stratus expertise to end customers.
The goal is to better reward and support Stratus partners that are most loyal to the company via a deal registration portal, says Mike Bradshaw, senior director for global channels and partner ecosystem at Stratus Technologies.
Stratus is especially focused on partners that have or want to acquire edge computing expertise, says Bradshaw. The company this week also rolled out updates to its ztC Edge platform portfolio to improve both performance and manageability.
As edge computing evolves, Bradshaw says Stratus expects demand for resilient infrastructure at the edge to substantially increase because it’s not feasible for most organizations to dispatch IT staff to wherever these systems are deployed.
As an early pioneer of high-availability systems, Stratus has found itself challenged more aggressively in the data center by larger rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell Technologies. The rise of edge computing represents an opportunity for Stratus to increase the size of the total addressable market partners.
“There will be new markets,” says Bradshaw.
Bradshaw says there are roughly 280 active Stratus partners today. Stratus doesn’t have a precise goal in terms of new partners it is looking to recruit, says Bradshaw. However, the program is designed to reward partners that do more than the occasional one-off sale of a platform, notes Bradshaw.
It’s too early to say how big an opportunity edge computing might represent for channel partners. However, it’s quite possible there might be more application workloads running at the edge one day than there are in the cloud.
Best of all, those workloads are likely to be far more distributed, which should theoretically boost demand for managed services. The challenge and the opportunity for channel partners is to in advance of the demand make sure they have the expertise in place required to service it.
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