As fundamentally important as it is for a solution provider to make money by selling a particular product, there are a handful of IT management tools that, when properly employed, create opportunities that go well beyond the price of the software.
Looking to capitalize on that simple fact, Xangati has extended its channel program to include not just resellers, but also integrators and service providers, and hired Fred Pazos as its new vice president of sales.
Tasked with creating a more robust channel program, Pazos said one of the implicit value propositions of Xangati performance management tools is that they can identify points of contention inside and out of the cloud that help the solution provider gain credibility with the customer.
“We give solution providers a way to provide real-time correlation across any workflow,” said Pazos. “We want solution providers to include Xangati as part of every proof of concept.”
In addition to providing Xangati at no cost for 30 days to help solution providers build those proofs of concept, Xangati will be increasing the amount of market development funds it makes available to channel partners, Pazos said. Xangati is also increasing the margins it provides partners that deploy Xanagati in challenging virtualization environments, he added.
Kou Pa, an account manager at Capital Data, a solution provider based in Milwaukee, said that one of the primary reasons his company opted to resell Xangati technology is that, as a company that doesn’t sell hardware or applications, Xangati doesn’t appear to the customer as having any particular bias. In contrast, IT performance management tools from major vendors are less trusted because the customer suspects they may be weighted to one particular outcome, said Pa.
“It’s really not about the tool,” said Pa. “In our case it’s more about providing enablement software for our customers.”
In an IT world where, thanks to the rise of virtualization, the complexity of the data center environment has increased multiple times over, having tools that allow Capital Data to navigate that complexity has become critical, Pa said.
From a solution provider’s perspective, the best thing about being able to identify the points of contention inside a data center is that it generally gives the channel partner the first crack at fixing those contention issues. For that reason alone, the value of IT performance management goes well beyond the price of the software.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.