Networking News
Aviatrix’s Steve Mullaney: There’s No Going Back To ‘Cisco Model Of The 90s’
Gina Narcisi
“We’re very picky, actually, about who we work with. If somebody is tied to the old, on-prem world, and selling boxes, we say: ‘Good luck and hold your breath when the boat goes down, because you’re going to get pulled under,’” the company’s CEO Steve Mullaney tells CRN.
Tell us about Aviatrix’s channel strategy?
We’re still very much looking for real partners -- everybody says that, yes. But there will come a time when we will care about distribution and having thousands of partners, but we’re not at that time right now; this is this is still the early days. We’re very picky, actually, about who we work with. If somebody is tied to the old, on-prem world, and selling boxes, we say; “Good luck and hold your breath when the boat goes down, because you’re going to get pulled under really far, like the Titanic.” We’re looking for partners that really are born in the cloud and understand this whole shift, and don’t have that legacy business that they they’re trying to protect. We will work with others that kind of are both, but they’ll typically have a [cloud] section of their company. What I’m seeing now is even big firms like WWT, which are behemoths and made all their money on Cisco, are saying they see the shift too and don’t want to go down with the ship. [Partners] are now all rushing to that ship and we try to be very selective. We’ll obviously work with WWT and other [big partners] like that, and we will work with the other kind of right people. It might not be the entire sales organization, but the people that are kind of ”woke” in terms of cloud.
We have probably 8-10 solid [distributor] partners that work within the U.S. We tend to work very closely with these [partners] where we actually engaged with them and worked on joint deals and marketing events.
