A record number of attendees joined our Q3 partner webinar last week. For those who missed it, you can find the recording and presentation on our partner portal.
It is a great time to be a Palo Alto Networks partner. We have listened, learned and on February 4, we acted on your feedback, unveiling enhancements to our NextWave Partner Program that strengthens our alignment, ignites business growth and accelerates the transition to transformation services.
Since day one, we have been a channel-centric company, making the NextWave enhancements more than just a channels initiative. This is a company-wide go-to-market initiative. Here’s a video that captures the essence of our channel-centric culture.
Q3 Webinar Recap:
Karl Soderlund, senior vice president, Worldwide Channels, kicked off the webinar welcoming our more than 1,000 partners. He expressed his excitement around the NextWave launch and how we are better together. He summarized our new program strategy as an opportunity to add a new level of sophistication and simplicity to our partner engagements.
Next, we turned our focus to sharing the details around how we are enhancing our NextWave Partner Program.
To understand the enhancements, it is important to have the context around why we are changing. In the simplest of terms, the world is changing. As the security leader, we want to help our partners capitalize on the vast number of security growth opportunities by boosting their overall partner experience and making it easier to build a successful Palo Alto Networks-based security practice.
The NextWave Partner Program enhancements are tied to three key elements of success:
1. Increasing Profitability Initiatives: We are providing you with profitability initiatives that align to our key sales growth imperatives. These initiatives include:
- Deal Registration Incentive: You will receive an additional discount for securing new opportunities.
- Partner Value Incentive: This incentive provides four new ways to earn additional discounts on opportunities.
- Securing a new customer
- Adding VM-Series or VM-ELA (Enterprise License Agreement) to an opportunity
- Adding 3 attached subscriptions (WildFire, URL Filtering & Threat Prevention) to an opportunity
- Adding Traps to an opportunity
- Distribution Value Incentive: Is designed to motivate the distributor to help us educate and enable NextWave partners on the new enhancements.
- Renewals Incentive: When actively engaging existing customers, partners earn additional discount for proactively helping us improve our renewals effort.
- SaaS Deal Referral: Partners receive a fee for all RedLock opportunities that are referred to and closed by Palo Alto Networks.
- Diamond Rebate: Diamond Partners receive a rebate for driving Deal Registration plus Partner Value Incentive opportunities.
- Program Level Changes: We are consolidating partner tiers from four down to three. The new levels are Diamond Innovator (Highest Level), Platinum Innovator and Innovator (Entry Level).
- Hardware & Subscription Discount Structure: We have changed and tiered our hardware and subscription discount structure to strengthen our NextWave levels.
2. Enabling New Services Opportunities: The need for partner-delivered implementation, customization and security optimization services has never been higher. We want to help accelerate your services transition.
- Transformation Services: Even though customers are deploying more and more security innovation into their infrastructure, their ability optimize the technology and thus maximize their security posture requires the help of a trusted security advisor. We have developed a transformation services methodology and have packaged our best practices into new Services Offering Kits designed specifically for partners.
- Services Offering Kits: We now have three Service Offering Kits (Endpoint, Networking and Public Cloud) available to partners. These kits are complete with learning maps and training to develop services expertise. This includes access to the same tools, checklists and ROI models that Palo Alto Networks uses to build and deliver partner professional services to our mutual customers.
- Dedicated Managed Services Program: According to our annual partner satisfaction survey, 71% of the more 300 CEOs survey said, they would be increasing their investment in building a managed services practice. This, combined with rapid growth of the managed services business, has led to the creation of a dedicated program. This is a major channel focus for us in FY19. Although the new NextWave Managed Services Program we will be selective to start, we are looking to scale as soon as possible.
3. Optimizing Systems, Processes and Structure: We have invested in automation to increase productivity, accelerate the sales cycle and improve the overall partner experience.
- Deal Opportunity: Partner Value Incentives are automatically selected and applied at quoting.
- Deal Quoting: All new program discounts and incentives are automatically added and calculated during quoting based on SKUs.
- Deal Approval: Deals quoted at standard price, are automatically approved within the system.
We realize this is a lot information for our partners to digest. Rest assured this is not the last time you will hear about our NextWave Partner Program enhancements. To help accelerate your program enablement, we highly encourage you to check out the enhancements details on the partner portal.
We look forward to you joining our next quarterly partner webinar in May.