Cloud News
Nerdio CRO Sees Boost From VMware, Citrix ‘Chaos’
Mark Haranas
‘Probably 90 percent of our customers are coming over from Citrix or VMware,’ said Nerdio’s CRO Joseph Landes.
Nerdio just revamped its MSP Partner Program. What are one or two of the big highlights?
One of the things that is super important to us is that we want to have a partner program that provides significant value and unique value to MSPs. We think we’ve achieved it.
The way our partner program now works is it simply is tied to the amount of spend that someone has with Nerdio. We have four different categories: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. At each level, you achieve a certain discount off of the cost of the licenses for Nerdio. That’s just a basic thing. But then we have other benefits.
For example, we run a lot of our own first-party events in the channel. We lean very heavy on education and teaching people how to build cloud practices in Azure.
So we run something called the Nerdio Training Camp, where an MSP will come to a city, and they’ll get hands-on training for eight hours on how to do it. We’ll give you somewhere between a $250 and $750 voucher to travel to the event—the event is free, but we’ll also give you the [travel] money if you’re at the right level. We now also have MDF for you to run your own Azure events for your customers.
We also have an event that we run at the end of February called NerdioCon, which is our own first-party big partner event in Cancun. If you’re at the highest level of our partner program—Platinum and Gold—you get a free all-expenses-paid trip to Cancun for either one or two people. If you’re at the lower levels, you get a percent discount on the cost of attending NerdioCon.
So we now have this nice array of benefits. We look at other vendors in the space ,and we don’t see other vendors doing it the way we do. We think it’s important as a vendor to come up with things that are uniquely good for an MSP to help them on their journey.
We launched version one of our partner program about a year ago. The main benefit from version one was NerdioCon. … But now we really thought about what else can we do. We have a certification program so you get free certification vouchers. We have free internal use licenses, so you get a certain number of those as you move through the tiers. So it’s a pretty rich program. Most MSPs we’ve talked to seem to appreciate that we’ve invested in it.
