If you’re prepared to address your customers’ work-from-home transition and their need for cloud-based security, there are healthy profit margins in your future. Indeed, one of the most significant movements emerging from the global pandemic is the WFH trend. In 2019, Cisco estimated that approximately 43 percent of workers worked from home at least some of the time. That number is projected to see an 83 percent increase in 2021, resulting in an estimated 25 to 30 million people working from home multiple days a week by the year’s end. Clearly, the WFH trend brings a lot of productivity and security challenges to businesses — and lucrative opportunities for the IT channel. Infoblox recently commissioned a study from Forrester to better understand the business strategies, trends and sales projections of a cross-section of Infoblox partners. Historically, partners have led with Infoblox’s core DDI network services. But the study found that when partners positioned Infoblox cloud security solutions either as the primary offering or as an upsell to the core DDI network services, the average sale price doubled. The study also revealed the average three-year financial impact of selling our cloud-first networking and security solutions. During the three-year analysis period, the average partner typically grew their customer base somewhere between 50 percent and 100 percent. The survey also revealed some of the things Infoblox channel partners are doing to successfully integrate SaaS into their go-to-market portfolios. With that in mind, here are three tips partners can use to capitalize on the WFH cloud sales trend. 1. M ake the Right Investments Our survey showed that to support their continued growth, our partners made strategic investments in three primary areas, and the first one is “general and administrative.” Most resellers invested in a single practice manager to help support SaaS-related growth. This resource often hired and established training programs for sales and delivery resources, created strategic alignment with SaaS technology vendors and deepened relationships with key accounts. Secondly was an investment in “training and certification.” Here sales and engineering teams experienced By Scott Jacobs WORK-FROM-HOME SAFE HOME Meeting the demand for SaaS-based threat defense and DDI THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK 28
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