Cloudera Unveils New Competencies for Partners To Win In A Data World

Fifty-six percent of Cloudera’s business is touched by a partner, a trend Cloudera hopes to continue and grow through a new channel program.

As Cloudera moves forward as a private company, it’s doubling down on its pitch to partners.

“We have competencies that we are building out that we are incentivizing the partners to take advantage of, and that will move them up in the tiers to higher level tiers to get greater rewards when they’re selling the product,” said Gary Green, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Cloudera.

Cloudera says 56 percent of its business is touched by a partner. So, it’s clear that partners play a big role in the company’s success, something that Cloudera now hopes to continue and strengthen as it debuts a new partner program with new rewards and competencies.

“We’ve come to realize that if we do business the way our partners do business and we reward them for doing business their way, then Cloudera will benefit from that. Ultimately, and more importantly, our customers will benefit from that,” said Rachel Tuller, head of global channel sales and alliances at Cloudera. “So, we have a competency-based program that we’ve just announced. We’ve got different rewards and incentives based on the skill sets and the attributes that our partners bring to the table. So it’s really a philosophy of rewarding partners for the way that they go to market and the way that they do business.”

The new program comes as Cloudera puts data at the heart of its business strategy with its Cloudera data platform, an offering targeting data engineers and data scientists in the enterprise market.

Partners have already seen the value of this sort of solution. In an interview with distributor TD Synnex, CRNtv learned that this solution enabled one of its customers to increase productivity by 40 percent with sellers.

“We had a client who was trying to increase sales and increase productivity of their sellers. And the challenges—and I come from a sales background, so I’ve seen this challenge before—is you’ve got reporting and data everywhere. So you’re not low on data, you’re low on being able to access the data at the right time. And so think about the time that it takes to search through your phone, to search through Excel spreadsheets. You know it’s somewhere, but you can’t find it. And [think] how inefficient that process is,” said Clay Davis, vice president of Global Analytics & IoT at TD Synnex. “Well, with a technology like Cloudera Data Platform, we actually were able to present this through our partner to [our] customer getting real data—the right data—in the right hands at the right time. So it’s just one way that Cloudera’s technology can really help modernize a client’s data estate.”

For more coverage on Cloudera and how it’s working with partners to reach its goals, stay tuned to CRNtv.