Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced its channel partner program has grown by five times in three years and expanded its global presence to new markets, such as Russia, India and Africa. The partners, which span all major industries, are building successful businesses around Canonical’s industry-leading open-source technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), data centers, private, public, and hybrid clouds.
The company also announced that Regis Paquette, Vice President Global Alliances, Public Cloud and Channels, has been recognized in an industry organization’s 2021 Channel Chief honors.
The momentum of Canonical’s channels program is the result of four initiatives. First, the deeper engagements with all major OEMs such as IBM, Dell EMC, Ericsson etc. to help them build solutions based on Canonical technologies.
Second, a greater focus has been made on distributors and VARs to satisfy a greater variety of the value-added resellers and to multiply the service reach for Canonical services globally by certifying VARs on support and delivery of Ubuntu. Factor Group, Fairbanks, Netweb, NextGen, Corespace have all added certification and great business successes as a result
Third, Canonical attributes channel program growth to launching a truly joint offering with major public cloud brands, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google around Ubuntu Pro.
And last but not least, success was achieved by launching a GSI Partner Program and landing flagship deals with big brands such as Tata Consulting Services, HPE or Infosys.
Benefits of Canonical’s channel program include:
- Rich portfolio of products – Partners are able to resell the full range of Canonical’s portfolio of private and public cloud products: Openstack, Kubernetes, IoT, support, security and compliance for Ubuntu.
- Sales engagement – Canonical helps train field sales and presales teams and provides sales collateral and permission to use the Canonical and Ubuntu trademarks in the partner’s materials.
- Training and certification – Partners gain access to technology that is the foundation for digital transformation and gets to become certified for L1, L2 support levels, cloud and K8s delivery capabilities, as well as marketing support and alignment with a trusted brand.
- Technical enablement – Canonical provides in-depth technical training for partners’ customer engineering teams with access to technical resources for labs and customer engagements.
- Go-to-market – Working with Canonical’s dedicated partner team, partners get new joint marketing opportunities and lead generation.
