Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt On Relaunched Channel Program And Goal To Include Partners In '100 Percent Of Transactions'

'If you're going after the traditional [VARs] that are still tasked with pushing X Cisco boxes per quarter, it's going to be hard to get their attention,' Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt says on the company's revitalized strategy to go after the booming $30 billion cloud networking opportunity.


Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt is repositioning the company around what he believes is the best and only path to success: partners.

The former CEO of Splunk and current CEO of the cloud networking specialist has spent the last year and a half understanding the company and how best to get Aviatrix’s message across as the “unique, sophisticated, difficult and different" platform the firm launched with in 2014. A longtime channel champion, Merritt is going full steam ahead into the market with the channel.

To that end, Merritt brought on Anh Profiti, head of global channels for Aviatrix who has been instrumental in crafting a brand-new partner program that the company launched this month. The launch, said Merritt, could be thought of as a relaunch of Aviatrix as it seeks to capture more share in the $30 billion cloud networking market alongside the channel.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Aviatrix, under the direction of Merritt, has a lofty goal of 100 percent of its transactions this year either be partner-led or partner-attached. That’s up from some sub-10 percent right now, he said. At the same time, Aviatrix doesn't plan on collecting as many partners as it can. Rather, the company wants to identify and onboard a select set of 30 strategic channel partners for its FY26, which starts in February.

Merritt sat down with CRN to discuss the new partner program, the importance of the channel, and his vision for the cloud networking standout in 2025. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Why was now the time for a relaunched channel program for Aviatrix?

I think that partners in general have a lot of mixed views from executive teams and CEOs on how strategic, critical or deeply embedded they should be within organizations. If I go back and look, I was around as channel really was climbing the curve back in the late ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s as organizations were really getting much more pervasive with IT and building up proprietary data centers and channel was absolutely mission critical. Being the key partner ally, provider, reseller for the many, many boxes that were necessary for those data centers and the key areas that I really watched channel bloom around, networking was one of those -- networking and security -- because there are so many boxes. There's routing boxes, VPN boxes, DNS boxes, firewalling boxes [etc.] and they've always been 10-20 percent of a data center bill. They need refresh, and it was an awesome avenue for channel. At Aviatrix through the past, I would characterize leadership is not being that enamored with partners overall, which is not unusual organizations [and] when you're just getting going, it's hard for partners to really care about smaller organizations. But we definitely had the orientation of: 'What we do is really unique and sophisticated and difficult and different, and the only ones that can really convey this have got to be Aviatrix folks.' Now I've been here a year and a half. I've lived with channel for my entire career. I've seen the power that partners can have, and especially in our segments of the industry, and I can't find many players over the past 30 years in networking and network security that have gotten to a really successful status unless they're aligned with channel.

How is your extensive tech background as a leader influencing the direction of Aviatrix?

In general, when I look at tech, it’s always an ecosystem no matter how dominant you are. A Salesforce, super dominant in CRM. The number of partners they have is through the roof because even though you're incredibly material and weighty in your segment, there are so many different entities that got to come to the table to really solve customer's needs. My orientation as a leader is that we're a social species. We only work well as we cooperate with each other. It's pervasive in our day-to-day life, but certainly in our industry, you're only as strong as your ecosystem. So, my first year here really was diving deep and understanding: What do we have? How material is it? How should we package it to make it more understandable? How should we organize the company in different ways to enhance the way that we've been doing things so we can get well lined up to re-emerge in a different way than we had been operating? Part of that from the very beginning was [having] an extremely strong partner orientation. On an investment basis internally, we've been very overweight as far as growth and dollars invested in a percentage basis on everything partner, which was a massive departure from the past.

As Anh [Profiti] landed last fall, we got much more clear on: OK, we have this incredible platform that we're selling, and that's the uniqueness. We're a software-defined networking platform. We integrate. We don't have this box mentality. We integrate routing and firewalling and observability and a bunch of other independent boxes in one uniform solution. The only way we make the solution understandable to the market is we have to box it back down into the structures that we start channel first that a channel would understand, because they have divisions within their company that sell firewalls. They have divisions to sell routers, and so the whole pivot that we've been making, that we're now much more aggressively launching as we enter our new fiscal year, February 1, is to move recognize the power of the platform, but box that platform down into much more specific use cases with much more targeted insertion points within the cloud that really started channel-first. As part of that, we also recognize that while we've had channel partnerships in the past -- we have well over 100 partners that are under old contracts with us. We didn't ignore them completely -- we just didn't treat them as the valuable peers and strategic co-compatriots that they should be, [and] to really make us interesting and valuable, we're going to have to reformulate the channel program.

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How critical is the channel moving forward to Aviatrix's strategy?

As part of this whole [partner program] relaunch, it's really almost a relaunch of the company. We're changing the way that we talk about ourselves with much more specific use case-driven frameworks for problems that we solve, that, hopefully if we've done our job, are deeply tied to key business priorities that CIOs have as they're continuing to work their way through their cloud journey and their new hybrid landscape as these neoclouds and GenAI frameworks are entering the picture and they're revisiting what they want to do with their data centers. But the real initiation point was, if we can make this understandable and digestible the channel, then we can make it understandable, digestible and much more effective to the customer, and we can make it much more understandable digestible to our own employees, which is an inversion. The initiation was, we're so smart and we're so unique, we've got to be employee first, and eventually people will get it. But we're really trying to flip that entire equation. And as part of that, the charter that [Profiti] took up and drove was: We've got to make our program extremely compelling to the channel, because you get one chance to make a first impression. You've got to put your money where your mouth is and make sure that this has the opportunity to be a really valuable revenue generation opportunity for channel partners.

What I've found through the years is it's a hard discipline that a lot of partner folks don't take, is you really, really have to start with the business of the partner and what does their P&L look like today? Where are they driving their revenue? And if there's not a path with what you are offering, whether you're a behemoth like Splunk or a startup like a $100 million-dollar mid-sized company like Aviatrix. If there's not a path to that channel partner that we both agree we can become a material proportion of their P&L, then you're never going to get that strategic relationship. Let's make it fit into the way they go to market, and let's make sure that's highly enticing and reporting for them to spend time with us, because we've got to find a way to march up the stack to eventually be a top 10 or top five or top three or top one revenue generator for them.

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What kinds of partners are you looking to work with?

We've actually bucketed them down into the five core areas, from channel partner, to strategic alliance tech partner, to systems integrator, to disty, but what we found is that even if you're a behemoth like WWT, SHI or Presidio, all of them are under pressure. There's some resurgence in box sales as people are re-crafting their data centers, which is great [because] that continues to propel their traditional relationships, but they're under pressure to have a really compelling and differentiated approach for cloud insertion, and they wind up having teams that are dedicated to: how do I drive revenue within an AWS landscape [or] within an Azure framework? We've found, so far, that all the partners are on the table, we just have to be disciplined, and where within the partner are we landing? Because if you're going after the traditional [VARs] that are still tasked with pushing X Cisco boxes per quarter, it's going to be hard to get their attention.

Multi racial group of people working with Paperwork on a board room table at a business presentation or seminar. The documents have financial or marketing figures, graphs and charts on them. People are pointing to different documents. There is a laptop on the table What is the main goal of the new partner program in 2025?

The philosophy goes way back to the initiative and how I started the conversation, which is, we need to really, really drive strategic partnership. We need to be a material portion of [partners'] P&L, for whatever the partner we're talking to. It's going to be difficult to be material for WWT right away, but for the group that we're interacting with, we need to find a way to become the vendor that winds up consuming a lot of their cycles. You've got to employ the exact same strategies as Splunk when we were $180 million when I joined. So, we were tiny back then [and] we [could not] have 1,000 partners when we had $180 million in revenue. We've got to re-center and focus on fewer partners, and go deeper with them, but from a metrics, a quantitative metrics basis, internally, we're starting with the assumption and the framework that the goal is to have 100 percent of our transactions this year either be partner-led or partner attached, that's going from probably some sub-10 percent right now.