TD Synnex Launches PartnerFirst Digital Partner Portal

‘We’re talking about things like being able to search for hardware and cloud products, being able to search for traditional orders and subscriptions, being able to order hardware and cloud together in one shopping cart. ... These are things that partners have been asking for and things that are delivered in our PartnerFirst platform,’ says Nate Herz, TD Synnex’s CIO, North America.

IT distributor TD Synnex Thursday used its annual TD Synnex Inspire partner conference to roll out a new digital partner portal aimed at making it easier for channel partners to work with the company.

The new portal, called PartnerFirst, brings together a wide range of capabilities into a single platform, said Nate Herz, CIO of North America for the distributor, which has dual headquarters in Fremont, Calif., and Clearwater, Fla.

“PartnerFirst is a new digital experience platform that TD Synnex is offering to our partners,” Herz told CRN. “It brings together the totality of the capabilities that TD Synnex offers to the community, spanning training and enablement, communities, loyalty programs, partner health and fitness, and our commerce capabilities into one singular platform that allows partners to really take advantage of all that’s available.”

TD Synnex has had a partner portal for years, Herz said.

“But in the past, our digital experience was fragmented, and what we found as a result of that is that partners weren’t able to take advantage of the depth of what we’re able to offer,” he said. “So we’ve pulled that all together into a really coordinated experience so the partners can get the most out of their experience with TD Synnex and can improve their business as a result.”

In addition to providing a cohesive experience across that training and enablement, communities and the commerce experience, PartnerFirst brings new capabilities to the channel thanks to input from TD Synnex’s PartnerLink community, Herz said.

“We’re talking about things like being able to search for hardware and cloud products, being able to search for traditional orders and subscriptions, being able to order hardware and cloud together in one shopping cart, and nuance capabilities like the ability to select different payment terms for the hardware versus the annuities,” he said. “These are things that partners have been asking for and things that are delivered in our PartnerFirst platform.”

Herz said that for TD Synnex, the name “PartnerFirst” comes from putting partners at the center of what the distributor does.

“Fundamentally, that’s what we’re trying to achieve,” he said. “It’s not about our company. It’s for the partners. We want to emphasize that in the name, because this platform was built with partners, for partners, and it’s something that we think will improve their business. And so we wanted the name to really exemplify and underscore putting partners at the center of everything.”

Looking ahead, TD Synnex will be rolling out PartnerFirst to multiple regions and will be bringing more resources through the program to channel partners, Herz said.

“We’ll be opening our TD Synnex AI-ready information for partners to be able to consume,” he said. “We will extend our resources to be available to partners to create AI agents on their end that use information provided by us. That’s the next big step. The other piece is we’ll continue to work with the PartnerLink community, which worked with us as we built this platform, to identify more areas that we can add value using technology.”

While PartnerFirst was built with input from the distributor’s PartnerLink community, it will be available to all its solution providers, Herz said.

For partners, it’s important that partner portals get done right, said Joseph Price, assistant vice president of partner alliances at Blue Ally Technology Solutions, an Atlanta-based solution provider that works with TD Synnex.

“The reality of it is that we’re all moving very rapidly and, quite frankly, not everybody’s available or accessible on the phone,” Price told CRN. “We need to get information very quickly, very rapidly. Typically, we can go to the portal if it is easily accessible, if it is easily displayed so you can easily navigate it. One of the challenges we run into with so many companies when it comes to their partner portal is you search and search and can’t find a thing. You see so many options, and you have to search through so many options to ultimately find out what you need. It’s so counterproductive.”

Price said he is looking forward to seeing how TD Synnex’s PartnerFirst portal works.

“Partner portals need to be digital, and they need to be partner-friendly and concise,” he said.