By Florian Malecki, International Product Marketing Senior Director, StorageCraft an Arcserve Company
Changes in partner programmes
The pandemic has undoubtedly created long-term lasting effects for partner relationships with vendors. Various lockdowns have forced businesses to move to remote working en masse, in turn meaning they rely on their MSP partners more than ever to help them manage operations. In a recent survey of MSPs conducted by Arcserve, nearly three quarters (74%) said they expect to continue to support an increasingly distributed workforce, even post pandemic.
Partners are adapting to the influx of demand for their services in a number of ways, with 76% of MSPs accelerating plans to either merge with or purchase another Solution Provider. But what’s uniform across the board is that MSPs and partners are working closer than ever with technology vendors. The collaboration witnessed this year in response to an acceleration in many businesses’ digital transformation programmes is next to none.
Changes in partner and vendor relationships
While partners and vendors have always required a close relationship, with such rapid changes in the requirements of end customers partnerships have become even closer. Distributors and partners alike now expect vendors to keep up with shifting customer demands, particularly when it comes to rapidly evolving technology needs. Arcserve’s survey of MSPs showed respondents were seeing heightened customer engagement across a number of areas including cyber security services (57%), collaboration/mobility tools (50%) and migrating servers off-premises and into the cloud (41%).
Meanwhile, MSPs pointed to a range of requirements from their vendor partners, with ‘exceptional support,’ and technology and training certifications ranking highest. As we look to the future, the pandemic has acted as a catalyst to accelerate trends that were already at play.
Now more than ever, vendors, distributors and partners expect relationships to become increasingly collaborative, agile and flexible as we begin to look beyond the pandemic.
As Senior Director, International Product Marketing at Arcserve, Florian Malecki drives the development of the vendor’s data protection and storage solutions for the regions’ markets. His key responsibilities include messaging, positioning, and the evangelization of Arcserve data protection and scale-out immutable storage solutions to customers, partners, media and industry analysts. Prior to joining Arcserve (formerly StorageCraft), Mr. Malecki worked in senior roles at SonicWall, Dell, Aventail, ClearSwift, Omgeo, Lucent Technologies and Air Products. He earned a Master’s degree in Business, Marketing and Technology from Ecole Supérieure Des Affaires et DesTechnologies, France.
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