To help sustain its partner growth, CommVault, a data management and protection vendor, has introduced new online sales and technical accreditation offerings to its North American PartnerAdvantage channel program.
In an interview with CDN last fall, Mark Conley, director of North American channels at CommVault, said the company had just over 220 partners enrolled in PartnerAdvantage. Today, there are over 300 partners in the program, and that number continues to grow, he said.
To help support its partners, CommVault has Paul Dier, partner development manager for Canada, overseeing the channel and its business.
“But our partner population is growing faster than our ability to connect with them in a timely fashion,” Conley said. “In Canada, to rely on Paul to go out and train every new partner in a timely fashion can’t happen, so we have new tools for partner enablement.”
The new tools in PartnerAdvantage are online sales resources and partner accreditation courses, which are designed primarily for partners that are new to the CommVault family. However, that’s not to say that partners that have been with CommVault for longer won’t benefit from this as well.
Conley describes the new offerings as “high quality tools” that partners can take advantage of to get up to speed with CommVault. As part of CommVault’s ongoing commitment to the channel, Conley said these resources are free to partners.
The accreditation offerings are posted on CommVault’s InnerVault partner portal. Here, partners will find solution-specific presentations, MP3 podcasts, planning aids, solution brochures, and more. Solution areas include categories such as backup and recovery, deduplication and virtualization. Partners can work at their own pace to find information and educate themselves, as they prepare to take the respective online competency test. Partners need to complete accreditation training as part of their ongoing authorization, he added.
The new online tools are designed to help partners reduce the amount of time it takes to get trained and are also meant to help reduce travel expenses. By being able to access and find what they need online, partners can establish faster sales cycles and can engage in new end-user opportunities.
Conley said CommVault will continue having its face-to-face trainings with partners, but for the new ones who join, they can use the tools to “get started” right away.
“We’re already starting to look at how we can rev the online tools and accreditation up now to make them better,” Conley said.