Domino Data Lab Launches Inaugural Partner Program Targeting Service, Technology Providers

The new two-tier Domino Partner Network provides multiple tracks to engage the broad range of partners that work with the company’s machine learning and data science platform.

Domino Data Lab is launching the company’s first partner program today as the data science and MLOps software developer looks to scale up its work with service and technology partners and provide them with a structured program with more resources and benefits.

The new Domino Partner Network will provide structure for what has largely been ad hoc partner processes, according to Domino executives. It will help the company expand and scale its work with partners and provide them with needed training, go-to-market resources and incentives.

“Our push to formalize this partner program and to work with a wider range of partners is really being driven by our customers,” CEO Nick Elprin said in an interview with CRN. “At a high level, what we’re doing is formalizing an approach and a structure for how we work with partners.”

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“Our strong belief about this market is that it’s far better to go to it together than to go it alone,” Elprin said.

Domino, headquartered in San Francisco, is a leading company in the fast-growing machine learning, model development and data science area with its flagship Domino Data Science Platform and Domino Model Monitor software.

Domino positions its software to work at the center of machine learning and data science initiatives. “So, we have historically worked with a huge variety of partners across different categories of products and services,” Elprin said. That includes systems integrators and solution providers, consultants, application developers, cloud platform and IT system vendors.

Today about 50 percent of Domino’s customer engagements in some way involve a solution provider, reseller or influencer partner, Elprin said. But that number increases to nearly 100 percent when technology, application and platform vendor partners are added to the mix.

The DPN program will make it easier for Domino to recruit and onboard new partners, said Abe Pursell, Domino’s head of partnerships, in the interview with CRN. Domino is actively recruiting partners who can provide consulting and advisory services around business transformation and digital transformation: Machine learning and AI are often components of such projects with the Domino platform providing those capabilities.

The DPN program will offer Standard and Premier tiers. Technical credentials around the Domino platform will be key for joining the program while the Premier level will be reserved for partners with deeper customer relationships, requiring greater investment in their Domino practice, among other considerations, Pursell said.

DPN has multiple tracks for Domino’s diverse partner base including a Solutions track for partners that build custom solutions – including for vertical industries – around Domino’s MLOps platform. The Implementation and Consulting track is for partners who provide systems implementation, integration and support services and consultants with expertise in data science, change management and machine learning best practices.

An Infrastructure track is for enterprise IT infrastructure providers, including cloud platform companies, that work with Domino. And a Tools & Data track targets partners who develop software that works with Domino’s MLOps platform and partners that provide data used by the system.

The new program offers joint marketing opportunities and financial incentives for partners, including discounts for partners who resell Domino software and referral fees for influencers who bring customers to the vendor, Pursell said.

Providing services partners with training and enablement resources is a major focus of the new DPN given that customers implementing and scaling the Domino platform for machine learning and data science initiatives often need support from partners with diverse technical capabilities.

“As companies increasingly invest in ML technologies, we help enterprise clients bootstrap capabilities to prove and then scale the benefits of data science,” said Peter Vaihansky, senior vice president and partnership lead at software engineering firm DataArt, a Domino implementation and consulting partner, in a statement. “Our partnership with Domino allows us to quickly prove value for our clients, leveraging the latest in data science technologies, enabling more confident, model-driven decisions.”

“We’re seeing a lot of growth and with that growth we need to build out our ecosystem of service partners,” Pursell said. “That is a function of training and enablement as much as it is incentivizing [partners] on the front end to generate demand.”

“There’s a big opportunity for partners to invest in and build out a Domino practice to fill out the services that go around Domino,” Pursell said, citing implementation, maintenance, administration, upgrade and field data science services as opportunities.

Domino also works closely with technology partners whose products are integrated with Domino. Such partners who join DPN will have more visibility into Domino’s technology roadmap, early access to new features through Domino Beta Programs, and enterprise-level technical support for joint customers, Pursell said.

Inaugural partners in the program include DataArt, global systems integrator Accenture, solution provider Slalom, application developer MathWorks, cloud platform companies AWS and Snowflake, chipmaker Nvidia, system manufacturer Dell Technologies and storage vendor NetApp.

Domino and MathWorks formed a strategic alliance in May through which the Domino platform is integrated with MathWorks’ MATLAB and Simulink programming and simulation tools to accelerate machine learning model development.

“By deepening our engagement with – and our support for – partners, ultimately [the DPN program] is going to let us provide better integrated experiences for our customers and help them get more value out of our platform and our partners’ products and offerings,” CEO Elprin said.