Interview We are working hard internally with
the professional services and customer success teams to really deliver that one- on-one experience and create those margin opportunities for the partner. Tat way, you get happier customers, you’re driving customer success, and you’re basically growing the business as the customer matures.
Tere have recently been a number of channel-related appointments at Cato – what was the catalyst for this? Right now, we have a really strong channel team at Cato and we’re continuing to build this strength with recruiting channel managers in Europe, especially in the Nordic region. We want to fill the coverage gaps in our team to enable us to continue our expansion. We have the very experienced Mark Draper heading up business in Europe and I am here to support the growth of the channel business. My experience in building the channel for companies like Veeam and Cohesity, which were all very much in start-up mode and pre-IPO, will hopefully be invaluable to the team at Cato. We’ve made some great hires in the Americas, adding a strong
team member to handle the resell and MSP side. Plus, we’re also looking to really hit some of the mature markets that we have over in APAC, like Japan and Australia, and add people to the team there. Cato is very much a channel-first company. We were built around
the channel and wanted to hire, not necessarily for skill gaps, but people that have proper channel experience. Just like our leader, Shlomo Kramer, who has been there with various companies before, we look out for channel builders, not just channel maintainers.
How do you plan to build successful channel partnerships? It’s all about hard work. One thing that has been truly heart- warming recently is I’m able to call on people that I’ve had relationships with throughout my career in the channel and talk to them about a new solution, offering them yet another golden opportunity for their business. With all partners, you want to be able to have a very tight plan and
strategy to be able to grow together. Many of the people I’m talking with have seen their business change over the last 12 months and we look to see how Cato might be able to help differentiate itself going forward creating a fresh strategy for growth. It’s about context and not going in simply to sell how fast and
secure Cato is with multiple PoPs, yes that is part of the value proposition, but it is more about understanding their business model and how we can fit into that. We want to understand how we can work together to make a more creative business. It doesn’t do anyone any good simply to swap out one competitor for another, or for us to swap out one partner for another, what does make sense is being creative and looking at the opportunities that might not be obvious. For channel partnerships to be successful you need to have a plan.
You need to be able to allow that partner to increase their margins with your support and there has to be a value around your offering.
50 | April 2023
What can channel partners expect to see in the coming months? Our partners are going to see a number of different things. Firstly, they’re going to see the technology rapidly advance. Partners will also see programme enhancements. But going back to my previous statement, we will most certainly respect what has gone before but innovate beyond it. We’re going to listen to our partners and look at what is and isn’t working for them. Our partners will see new managed and professional services,
they’ll be able to interact with us differently in the marketplace. Every single stakeholder within Cato is aligned with further building the channel business for success and this makes for some very exciting opportunities.
How are channel partnerships evolving? So let’s talk about the obvious and that’s how the business models are evolving. By this I mean, where you used to have self-funded businesses, they’re now private equity. Partners in the UK are a good example of this. UK-based Computacenter made acquisitions in the US which enabled it to go global. Also, US channel giant CDW has acquired Kelway to give them a European presence. Our partner Presidio wanted to invest in a partner like Arkphire in Ireland, not only to be able to expand their footprint but also their expertise. One fascinating transformation is how partners that were
traditionally data centre focussed are now cloud, security and networking. Tey’re becoming big businesses that are not just contained to four walls. Tere are no global boundaries restricting business anymore. On top of that partners are acquiring consulting firms for skills to expand their business in an entirely different direction. It certainly is an exciting place to be right now.”
How can channel partners take advantage of cloud products? Cato is a cloud-native solution, so it offers partners the ability to expand globally, and upgrade complicated customer environments easily without having to send someone to every individual site to swap out physical boxes. Now, the negative perception around that is the channel does
less and that is so far from the truth. In fact, the channel has the opportunity to optimise the design and manage their customer’s environments. Tey’re doing that right now. Te cloud provides all kinds of uptake, but then it goes beyond
that. An example would be the work AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Red Hat have done for dealing with the cloud marketplace. Tey’re now offering a whole different way of being able to secure products, manage customers, and in the case of some of the marketplaces, be able to add money that could be spent on your product because they’re burning down consumption commitments to be able to purchase other things. Te cloud has enabled the channel to be global, it’s taken away
some of the natural barriers and has been fully embraced to the point it’s definitely not going away.
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