01732 759725 CLOUD 42 Why partner with IONOS Cloud? Technology Reseller finds out slow to start with when we were very focused on direct sales. But what we realised is because IONOS inherently did not do any migrations or implementations, we needed partners to pick up that side of the business.” Today, IONOS has close to 50 partners in the UK, from one-man-band partners to much larger enterprise partners – and, according to Chanel, it is recruiting more all the time. “Last year was one of our biggest years. We on-boarded 20 partners, and we're looking to replicate that this year. We’re already well ahead of our target.” Partner benefits Chanel points out that one of the big attractions of IONOS is that it gives new partners growing space. It doesn’t instantly apply KPIs or revenue targets, but instead helps partners through the onboarding process and sales and technical training, whilst providing a great deal of hands-on support. “We have multiple touch points across the partner programme: you have an account manager, you have your technical solution architect, you have the partner channel team, you have a marketing team. We have multiple people that you can leverage within calls to your end users. It's a very human partner programme,” she said. “We know it takes time to bring in that revenue, but after two years the partner programme does come into play. If you're a Silver partner, we're expecting you to hit to £25k annual revenue. We go up to £150k for Gold partners and substantially more for Platinum partners.” IONOS currently has 10 Gold partners in the UK and five Platinum partners. Chanel adds that partners benefit from a cloud platform that is very easy to manage, with the ability to create sub-contracts for each of their customers, a convenient pay-as-you-go model, competitive pricing and good margins. “Partners can make between 10% and 27% margin on our cloud products. We also have an amazing marketing team that they can leverage as their own. A lot of our smaller partners don't have marketing teams. When it comes to building a marketing plan or a strategy or lead generation or events, our team can help them to do that. And we have a nice budget in terms of MDF to support them.” Growing markets Chanel adds that IONOS has had a great deal of success in working with partners that address specific vertical markets, citing the examples of GBE Converge in healthcare and MSP LAB in education. “That way, there’s not much crossover in terms of our partners all vying for the same business and we work with the partner to send out messaging to our existing customers: ‘If you're working in this vertical, we have this partner that's available to you and this is where they win really well’.” More even than education and healthcare, IONOS is seeing massive growth with i-gaming and gambling companies that are utilising Kubernetes as a service on the IONOS public cloud platform. “At the moment, 57% of our revenue comes from i-gaming and gambling and that goes through partners,” said Chanel. At the end of June, IONOS Cloud is opening another new area of business in the UK, with the launch of an Independent Software Vendors programme that will enable ISVs to offer their services through IONOS Cloud. The programme was launched in Germany and Europe in April and has already been successful in signing up Watchguard, DocuWare and oneclick. In the meantime, IONOS is continuing to push a green message. Late last year, with its UK subsidiary Fasthosts, IONOS opened a Tier IV data centre in Worcester that has been built in a very sustainable way with renewable energy, biofuelpowered generators and nature-friendly landscaping. “We need to be doing things that set us apart. That's why we're taking a really big role in going green – green data centres, sustainable infrastructure – and are really pushing that message out to our customers,” said Chanel. To find out more about partnering with IONOS Cloud, please visit https://cloud.ionos.co.uk/partner If you’ve seen its recent TV advertising campaign, you might be forgiven for regarding IONOS as a consumer-leaning web hosting brand. While this remains its core, IONOS also has a growing cloud business, IONOS Cloud, offering attractive revenue opportunities for channel partners. IONOS has built up its cloud offering over the last five years since acquiring German cloud provider ProfitBricks in 2017 and today it provides a wide range of public and private cloud infrastructure and cloud services to small and mediumsized businesses. Cloud is one of the fastest growing parts of IONOS, with a CAGR of circa 20% compared to overall revenue growth of 12% in 2021 and 15-18% (projected) in 2022. Chanel Patrick, UK Channel Manager at IONOS, says that the channel has been instrumental in delivering growth in the UK by providing capabilities that IONOS itself lacked. “The partner programme has been running for about four years now. It was The human touch Chanel Patrick
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