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Nebulon looks to reward partners involved with OEM sales
Vendor Nebulon sells largely through embedding its technology with a number of household OEMs, but is keen to make sure that partners are rewarded for their involvement
Nebulon is taking steps to ensure that partners that sell a solution that includes its technology will get supported and rewarded for doing so.
The firm offers a variety of products as part of its smartInfrastructure portfolio, but is often embedded in servers coming from a number of OEM partners, including Lenovo, HPE and SuperMicro.
In a move designed to reward those selling its technology, the vendor has launched its smartPartner programme, with the aim of supporting resellers and those that want to add further value to an OEM solution.
“Everything we do is about going to market [with partners]. We do business with OEMs and partners, and they take their products to market through their networks of distribution resellers,” said Tim Pitcher, vice-president of sales at Nebulon.
“Our programme is recognising that what we’re trying to do is enhance the Nebulon value and the excitement of selling Nebulon as part of their solutions with their partners and their networks.”
The programme has two main tenets, the first being around rewards with a standard three-tiered structure – silver, gold and platinum – with partners able to generate more benefits the higher they climb up the ladder.
The second feature of the programme is around incentivising those that are breaking fresh ground and introducing new customers to the Nebulon technology.
In many respects, the programme appears to be fairly straightforward, but because of the nature of the routes to market, Nebulon will be promoting the rewards through its existing OEM relationships.
“We’re not signing partners in the same way that we don’t sign customers. In the end, they’ll be buying a Lenovo solution from Lenovo that will have our service processing unit and Nebulon on cloud, which is where we take our revenues,” said Pitcher.
He added that Nebulon was adding internal headcount to make sure OEM partners could be brought up to speed with the programme, with the resellers that qualified for rewards identified.
“They get training and all the education they need, [as well as] online resources. On top of that, they get local resources that will help them with technical people, business development people in theatre, who will then go and help departments be successful,” he said.
“The trick to it is to make sure it’s nice and clean and that everyone understands where we fit and where we enter the customer conversation,” he added.
The programme has started with a handful of partners to get it going, but there are discussions about adding more in the UK to that initial batch.
“With the smartPartner programme, Nebulon is showing its commitment to expanding into the channel with incentives, marketing and certifications designed to help us accelerate business revenue,” said Dev Tyagi, chief sales and marketing officer at Boston, which is one of the first signups to the programme. “We are really pleased that Nebulon has opted to take a partner-first approach with this new programme.”
