Technology Reseller - v13 2018

01732 759725 Data Management 32 ...continued my CFO won’t allow me to spend twice as much on doing that, so it’s important for me to have a really motivated and excited and educated partner community out there. That will give me the scale and reach that I don’t get with my existing cost base. This new programme is all about the enablement of our partners, with accelerated opportunities for additional revenues and margins, as well as new products and solutions.” The highlight of the new programme is Elevate, Informatica’s new global event program, which kicked-off in Copenhagen in June before moving on to Bangkok in July and Denver in August. This brought together members of Informatica’s executive team, technical experts and regional sales people and provided hands-on labs and implementation workshops where partners could train up their sales, pre-sales and customer success teams and satisfy Informatica Partner Program accreditation requirements. SME pricing This summer, Informatica also introduced a new pricing strategy designed to attract small and medium-sized organisations. “Historically, we have been focused on the large enterprise space, but we have just launched mid-market pricing, which allows us to go after new customers. We are getting hundreds of new logos a year now, whereas before it would have been single figures or 10s and 20s,” explained Murphy. He added: “The fact that our products scale from small departmental-type solutions is one of the reasons our revenue has not dropped as we make the transition to a cloud subscription model. Before a partner would say ‘Informatica is the best but they are big and only do multi-year contracts, so we need to wait until we have enough demand across the whole business before we engage with Informatica’. That’s not the case now that we have small, medium-market pricing solutions. It’s the same solution whether it’s for 10 users or 10,000 users.” To find out more about Informatica’s partner programme, please visit www.informatica.com/gb. View from the channel is now an annual licensing model, in terms of it being a subscription, we, as a partner, and Informatica as a technology provider have to make sure the solution works for customers and keeps delivering year after year, or else they won’t renew. TR: What do you feel about Informatica’s plans to expand the channel network? KT: I think it’s very exciting. The reality is there will be different types of reseller. There will be some that just want to sell the software and there will be others, like ourselves, that want to deliver solutions. Because we now have the best part of a decade of experience in delivering Informatica solutions, there will be a greater opportunity for us to work with a much bigger network of partners that might want to use our skills to implement what they have sold. They will also get the Informatica brand out into the marketplace more, which will continue to generate sales opportunities for organisations like us. The more customers out there with Informatica the better as far as we are concerned. TR: Do you expect the market opportunity to grow significantly in the future? KT: The growth predicted in the broader data management market, which includes big data, analytics and hybrid cloud solutions, is exponential, and it is only going to get bigger as the volume of data grows. So we think there is huge opportunity. Although the move is to cloud, for some years to come most organisations will be operating in a hybrid environment, which makes things even more complicated than they would have been before. Customers will need to have expertise in the product but also strategic thinking around things like data governance. They will also need proven experience in how to manage data projects. Those are the kinds of thing we offer, so we think it’s a great opportunity for a company like Entity Group. www.informatica.com TR: Kate, what are your impressions of the new pricing model and the impact it might have on your business? KT: It’s important to say that Informatica has always had great relationships with partners. The pricing model is one thing that makes them an exciting company to work with at the moment, but the things that Steve also mentioned – the fact that they are growing, the fact that they are moving to cloud and that they have this new subscription model – make them really, really exciting for companies that want to go to market with them. The pricing is very helpful, because, as Steve said, he’s got a limited resource in terms of direct sales people. At Entity Group, we think that the best solutions for customers come from a combination, not just of technology, but of people and process. The opportunity for us is to create solutions for customers in many different areas, taking that technology at a reasonable price point and then building in things like our advisory services and our management services so that we create whole solutions rather than delivering a piece of software on its own. TR: Will the pricing change the types of business you can go after? KT: Absolutely. Steve mentioned they were seeing small numbers of new logos every year because, correctly or not, the impression of Informatica was that it was purely for the enterprise, when in fact the technology is excellent whatever size business you are. This new price point will allow us to go into a much broader set of organisations that still have the same business problems – they still want a single view of the customer; they still want to make their operations efficient; they still want to comply with regulations; they still want to have secure data. In the past, they probably would have had to take less sophisticated solutions and perhaps do a lot of custom work around them. Now, they can go straight to the leader in data management and say there is a good chance there’s something for my business that I can pay for on an annual basis. The other great thing is that because it The fact that our products scale from small departmental- type solutions is one of the reasons our revenue has not dropped as we make the transition to a cloud subscription model Technology Reseller (TR) asks Kate Tickner (KT), Business Development and Marketing Director at Entity Group, what the changes will mean for Informatica’s existing partners