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Dynatrace expanding channel reach
Firm following strategy of working closely with strategic partners and developing channel-led segment to access more customers
Dynatrace is looking to widen its channel reach, working with a select number of partners, while also developing relationships with managed service providers that can take its technology to the mid-market.
The observability specialist has seen success working with a number of strategic partners, but with interest in its technology spreading across a wider customer base, the firm has looked to meet that demand through a larger number of channel relationships.
Spearheading most of that activity is Jay Snyder, Dynatrace’s senior vice-president of partners and alliances, who has been with the business for six months and has already started to make an impact on channel strategy.
“Traditionally, Dynatrace is focused on the Fortune 2,000 or 5,000, wherever you want to call it,” he said. “We just re-segmented our sales organisation to focus really at the high end, but we’ve carved out a commercial business as well, which is going to be predominantly, if not exclusively, partner led.
“There’s going to be a strong play for partners that provide a managed service into that commercial space,” said Snyder. “So, we’re bifurcating how we think about it.”
For now, the vendor has decided not to use distribution to get to those partners, but will generate relationships on its own steam.
“We’ll go directly from an inside sales model right to our partners,” he said. “I will consider distribution, but we’re going to choose a handful of partners and each of the regions that we think can effectively prosecute that commercial market. A lot of those players will probably end up being managed service providers, because they provide a layer that isn’t specific to just observability, but it’s a handful of IT services that you find those smaller companies need anyway and that creates the stickiness for us and then provides a solution over time.”
Strategic partners
The vendor is committed to supporting its existing strategic partners, which have been able to help it grow the business.
“Internal resources [are focused on] the strategic and enterprise space, and we’re going to work with our biggest partners,” said Synder.
An example of those partnerships in action comes from Andy Fleck, head of digital performance management at Eviden, who said it had taken the Dynatrace technology and been able to drive it further into customer businesses as it identified more areas where observability could make a positive impact.
“We were delivering managed services around observability typically to customers experiencing pain with the performance of their applications,” he said. “It was a single use case, and over time we’ve consolidated that observability capability from the different parts of [the business] as it’s grown and acquired, and then put those into one place.”
As customers have moved to multi-cloud environments, the complexity has increased, and so have the opportunities for those delivering observability.
“One of the main growth areas is with public cloud adoption, so when a customer has a business service, which is on-premise, they want to migrate that to one of the public clouds, but they want to do that simply and quickly with less risk, and where it really becomes interesting is when you also include the hyperscalers in the discussion as well,” he said. “You can have a tripartite discussion between the MSP, us in that case, but also Dynatrace and AWS.”
