Intel Unifies Partner Tools With New Intel Partner Alliance Portal

The chipmaker’s channel partners will no longer need to juggle multiple logins thanks to the new Intel Partner Alliance online portal, which launches Jan. 11 and provides personalized content and a consolidated hub of benefits in a bid to improve engagement with partners.

Intel wants to make it easier for partners to do business with the chipmaker through a new online portal that will allow them to access resources and manage benefits in a single interface with one login.

The new online portal is central to the new Intel Partner Alliance program, which launches Monday and consolidates previously disparate partner programs, including the Intel Technology Provider program and Intel IoT Solutions Alliance, under one umbrella. There, partners will be able to access training through Intel Partner University as well as sales lead and collaboration opportunities through Intel Solutions Marketplace, both of which launched in 2019.

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Intel Partner Alliance will bring together tens of thousands of partners of different roles—including solution providers, OEMs, software vendors and cloud service providers—and Intel intends to give each partner a personalized experience in the new online portal based on role and the level of business with Intel, both of which determine what kind of benefits and how many benefits are available.

“It’s really about a richer portfolio of solution-oriented content that can be geared towards the partner’s role, whether they’re an OEM or a manufacturer or a services integrator or a cloud practitioner,” Eric Thompson, Intel’s general manager of global partner enablement, told CRN. “They’re looking for different kinds of support from Intel. We don’t want that to be a static experience.”

For instance, an Intel distributor will see Intel Partner University, Intel Solutions Marketplace and Intel Marketing Studio as well as pages for lead management, customer support, products and road maps and pricing, points and promotions on the front page of the online portal. Meanwhile, an Intel cloud service provider partner would see all of those minus the pages for lead management, pricing and products and road maps, plus pages for points and rewards and market development funds.

“This is the first time that we have all of our benefits of a program accessible in one place, and we are super proud of that,” said Colby Wilson, an audience experience strategist at Intel.

The online portal also provides recommendations for points and rewards offers for products as well as personalized content on a range of topics, 15 in all, from 5G applications to in-memory databases, based on the types of solutions and services the partner provides.

All of these elements are further personalized at an employee level within a partner’s company so that a marketing specialist’s online portal may look different than a partner administrator’s online portal.

Some partners will have an opportunity to join communities in Intel Partner Alliance around cloud computing, IoT and field-programmable gate arrays. For partners who do belong to communities, they will see community content in addition to other personalized content on the portal.

The Intel Partner Alliance online portal comes with other improvements over previous partner tools and portals, such as quick links to the partner dashboard and company profile. The online portal also has a dashboard that centralizes information on sales, training and support. In addition, the bottom of every page has a help section with links for a knowledge database, submitting support tickets, online chat and a support phone directory.

Kent Tibbils, vice president of marketing at ASI, a Fremont, Calif.-based Intel distributor, said the personalization capabilities of the new online portal will be a more effective way for the chipmaker to serve its massive library of sales, marketing and technical content to partners.

“Not a lot of manufacturers have the depth of content that Intel has for training and everything else,” he said. “The challenge that goes along with that is that they have a lot of training materials, a lot of marketing materials and a lot of content, so figuring out what’s right for you or what you’re most interested in can sometimes be a little overwhelming. Having that intelligence built in will prove to be a nice benefit.”

Tibbils added that it’s important for Intel to continue investing in its partner program as the chipmaker faces growing competition from AMD, Nvidia and customers making their own processors.

“Intel’s partner program has clearly been something they have invested a lot of resources into over the many years, and it’s definitely something that helps keeps customers engaged and involved,” he said. “I would certainly say that leveraging that as something you bring to the overall market, it’s something that Intel should and will continue to focus on.”