Pivot3 Revamps Partner Program With ‘Refreshing’ New Enhancements

Hyper-converged and video surveillance specialist Pivot3 has enhanced its Global Partner Program to drive better margins and new deals for channel partners.

Pivot3 is boosting its Global Partner Program by increasing access to leads, making eligibility to joint marketing funds easier and expanding both sales and technical resources for the channel.

The hyper-converged infrastructure and video surveillance specialist says input from channel partners were core to streamlining and enhancing the partner program into a newly defined three-tier system. David Dimlich, President of SD3IT, a The Villages, Fla.-based Pivot3 partner, said Pivot3 is making life easier and more profitable for partners.

“Pivot3 has done a really good job here where they’ve identified, ‘Hey, we want our partners to be trained and really understand our technology, but we don’t want them spending six months taking classes to be able to go sell our product. We want them to be out on the street.’ -- that was refreshing to see,” said Dimlich. “Some of the other vendors in the past have almost certified you to death, that’s not the case here.”

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Bruce Milne, vice president, chief marketing officer and head of the channel program, said partners wanted more predictable profitability and expanded training to support their efforts in selling to vertical use cases. The new program – which tier levels include Authorized, Select and Premier -- is optimized to support two types of partners: security integrators that are new to IT infrastructure value propositions, and resellers in the video security market.

“Partners now have greater eligibility for pre-defined amounts of joint marketing funds through our MDF program, which is proposal-based,” said Milne. “MDF [is] proportional to historical and committed partner software revenue. This provides incremental discretionary funds to partners to promote Pivot3 products through awareness building, lead generation, customer engagement and education activities.”

Expanded training for both sales and technical resources is now available to partners, including online certifications, on-site workshops and extensive training for partner professional services resources.

“By being better training, by having more leads and additional marketing funds and profitability, it’s going to really enable us to go out and get new clients and drive new opportunities for them and us,” said Dimlich.

Partners are entitled to increasing discount levels based on their tier and on deal registration. The Austin, Texas-based company is also offering access to its Executive Briefing Centers to help partners win new customers and showcase Pivot3 solutions.

Pivot3 has also grown its two-tier distribution model by deepening its partnership with distributors such as Promark Technologies. The company recently hired Nicole Cardenas as channel marketing director for Pivot3. Cardenas was previously a national channel manager at Arrow Electronics.

The revamped Global Partner Program comes as Pivot3 doubles down on video surveillance and analytics innovation. The company is pushing partners to tap into Pivot3’s “sweet spot” of mission-critical and data-intensive use cases. Milne said Pivot3 is the only hyper-converged infrastructure provider that can support demanding write-intensive workloads such as video surveillance and IoT data.

“We’re currently transitioning into a world of video-based computing, with 60 percent of data created coming from video,” said Milne. “We give channel partners a differentiated solution to address the evolving needs of IT as customers adapt to support the huge amount of data generated from these workloads. This is a relatively untapped market.”

Milne says Pivot3’s strategy for 2020 is to innovate and grow both organically and inorganically through strategic partnerships. “Whether that’s certifying and providing guidance to customers on how to apply artificial intelligence to video files to get more value out of them, or inventing industry-first functionality like Policy-Based Management -- we’re keeping our partners ahead of the curve and helping them meet both the current and future needs of a new category of customers,” he said.

Dimlich said with the rise of 4K cameras and massive influx of video data needing to be stored, Pivot3’s future is bright. “As people realize that they can manage a vast amount of data for their video surveillance and IoT devices, but also use the same infrastructure to run their applications, I feel very positive for Pivot3 as that word gets out there and people are able to better market Pivot3 with this new channel program,” he said.