Building partner and channel businesses is a lot about trust and making partners central to the overall strategy of the company. It’s very exciting to see that our world-class partner and channel business has experienced triple digit growth in the last two and a half years. Our mission is to build deep long standing trust-based relationships that enable our partners to provide better solutions to their customers, helps them build profitable businesses and provide them with differentiation in the market. This growth we are experiencing is due to a few factors:
- Digital transformation
This trend continues to be a high priority for most enterprises today. With public cloud playing a major role in digital transformation, enterprises are looking to their trusted advisors and partners for assistance in this journey, who in turn need a cloud-native platform to help those enterprises build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructure.
- The evolution of traditional resellers
Again, with more enterprises using public clouds, this is forcing resellers to adapt their business models to the public cloud and build new value added services and capabilities. We are seeing a lot of activity here, especially in the managed security services( MSSs/MSSPs) market as these providers look to build new revenue streams using a cloud-native platform like Sumo Logic. In some cases we’re enabling these traditional providers to build a new security practice and are continuing to invest in this area to make this program richer.
- Expanding ISV Partner Ecosystem
The Sumo Logic platform enables partners to leverage a large and growing ecosystem of over 200 integrations. This includes integrations with widely used cloud services from AWS, GCP, Azure and leading SaaS companies in their respective markets such as Okta, Pager Duty and Crowdstrike, among others. These apps enable solution providers and resellers to provide much faster value to their customers, are customizable and come with best practices included.
Some of the key highlights I want to share from the past two plus years include:
Opening Up New Global Markets
Partners are a critical component for us to expand in international markets. We are seeing the initial investments in those regions start to pay off in a big way. Forty per cent (40%)of our partners are outside of the United States and we have focused our international expansion in a few key strategic markets including Japan, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. Our partner led approach internationally has also allowed us to recently expand to Hong Kong, Singapore, Spain and into the Nordics.
Expanded the Program to Include Managed Service Providers.
As I discussed earlier, we are seeing more organizations using managed service providers (MSPs) to help support the complexities of digital transformation. It made sense for us to partner with MSPs and managed security providers (MSSPs) to help companies gain access to our cloud-native, multi-tenant platform that can power their business growth, value and competitive advantage.
Since including MSPs and MSSPs into our program, Sumo Logic has brought onboard several new partners in this segment including eSentire and Expel.io to provide their enterprise customers with a platform for comprehensive monitoring, security and management to support their modern applications.
Rapidly Growing ISV Ecosystem
In the past 12 months, Sumo Logic added several new integrations in the Dev, Ops and Security markets. In fact with the release of our Kubernetes solution we have expanded this further to include a net new set of ISV partners such as StackRox, Aqua and others- almost all of the big players in container and Kubernetes security now integrate with Sumo Logic!
We believe this will enable our security partners to be far forward in cloud and container security and should make it very compelling for any MSSP, MDR or Security Consulting Provider to partner with Sumo Logic.
The Future
Sumo Logic is exploring new ways to empower resellers and solution providers with knowledge and insights into how Sumo Logic can be implemented across the technology stack for full spectrum visibility. We will continue to drive significant investment in our technology capabilities to allow partners to better manage, provision and service customers at a greater scale than anyone else in the market.
Stay tuned for further enhancements to the partner program that will potentially provide richer incentives for partners who build comprehensive practices based on the Sumo Logic platform.
