‘[Riverbed] had way too many partners. We had basically been accumulating partners over probably the last 10 years or so. If a partner did a single transaction with us, we’d signed them up to the partner program even if they weren’t really interested in having a long-term strategic discussion with us,’ says Alex Thurber, Riverbed’s senior vice president of global partners and alliances.

WAN optimization and observability technology developer Riverbed Tuesday unveiled Riverbed One, a new version of its channel program focused on simplicity both in terms of how the program works and the number of channel partners the company works with.

Riverbed has been transforming its business from a primary focus on acceleration and WAN optimization, which is still a great business for the company, to a larger focus on observability, said Alex Thurber, Riverbed’s senior vice president of global partners and alliances. For instance, Thurber told CRN, the company in May launched its new unified observability platform focused supporting customers in a true end-to-end manner regardless of the type of network.

At the same time, Thurber said he has been engaged in helping rebuild Riverbed’s go-to-market strategy.

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“We have a strong sales force around the world,” he said. “And in January, we reoriented them to a named account strategy from a broad territory-based coverage, which is important because that really is our key focus as an enterprise company. But what that did was open up all of our commercial accounts, which is everybody underneath that named account line, for the channel.”

As a result, Riverbed is working with channel partners to help them orient their focus on driving business in the commercial market, which Thurber said is enormous.

“We have a new end-user go-to-market strategy,” he said. “We have a new focus around the channel.”

About 90 percent of Riverbed’s business goes through indirect channels, Thurber said. The company has about 750 named accounts, and the company works with channel partners in those accounts, he said.

“In our named accounts, we assume we will take lead and then work with partners,” he said. “In the commercial accounts, we’re offering and asking the partners to take the lead and then we support them.”

To better work with channel partners, Riverbed Tuesday introduced the Riverbed One channel program. Part of that program includes a serious reduction in the number of channel partners Riverbed works with based on his experience working with his previous vendor employers as well as running his own solution provider, Thurber said.

“I did a number of other channel-focused turnarounds, and what I quickly found when I came to Riverbed was, we had two big issues,” he said. “One is, we had way too many partners. We had basically been accumulating partners over probably the last 10 years or so. If a partner did a single transaction with us, we’d signed them up to the partner program even if they weren’t really interested in having a long-term strategic discussion with us.”

The second problem was that Riverbed’s former channel program, called Riverbed Rise, had become incredibly complicated, Thurber said.

“That was because as a company, we were rapidly changing our focus,” he said. “Rise was still primarily built around a hardware and perpetual software model. And rather than do a real hard reset, we had just been adding elements to it. It just became just this mass of different products, different offers, lots of internal inconsistencies. It just made it very difficult not only for the partners to work with us, but often for our sales reps to work with the partners. And so rather than trying to edit yet again, what we decided to do is basically terminate the Rise program.”

As of June 1, Rise has been replaced by Riverbed One, which has a couple of new primary focuses, Thurber said.

The first is to simplify the overall program with a single program level, he said. “You are a Riverbed One partner, or you’re a transactional partner,” he said. “We had, I think, four plus two partner levels under Rise. So as I said, it got really hard. We just went to one level.”

That said, there will still be some transactional partners, Thurber said.

“At the end of the day, the customer is going to make the final decision who they buy from,” he said. “If they insist on working with a partner who’s not part of our program, all of our distributors have language in their contracts allowing them to do a one-off transaction with a non-Riverbed One partner to fulfill that transaction. The customer has to be happy. That’s key. But it won’t get to the point like in the old days when we would have added that partner into the program and ended up having thousands and thousands of partners.”

The second component to Riverbed One is the reduction of the number of Riverbed partners by over 90 percent, Thurber said.

“Riverbed One is an invite-only program,” he said. “We have chosen to invite about one out of 10 Riverbed partners to join. To be honest, these are the partners who do multiple transactions. They want to learn about our solutions. They want to be on the journey that we’re on, as opposed to doing a one-off fulfillment deal. And I’m pretty sure we got the right numbers because, to be honest, we haven’t heard many complaints from anybody when we said, ‘Hey, by the way, you’re no longer part of the new program. Here’s how you can fulfill this this through your local distributor.’ It’s been very quiet.”

By significantly reducing the number of partners, Riverbed is better able to concentrate on those partners and allow its channel account managers to build much tighter, deeper relationships, Thurber said.

“This is really important as we have moved our technology forward into this whole idea of an AI-powered unified observability platform, because that is a more complex undertaking,” he said. “We want to work closely with our partners on how best to position that, how to sell the solution overall, what are the business values, etc. It’s not just a deep technical sale. There’s a lot of technology, but there’s much more from a business perspective. And from a practical perspective, it means fewer partners have an opportunity to sell more things and are more apt to do more business with us.”

Riverbed One offers such provisions as deal registration and deal protection, Thurber said. The company also offers teaming or co-sell protection where if a partner is already working on a deal and the customer insists on bringing in a specific partner, the original partner is still protected, he said.

The simplicity of Riverbed One and the ability to let channel partners really focus on the Riverbed platform without worrying all of the ancillary things that used to be a part of the old program are very attractive facets of the program, said Rick Shafer, chief revenue officer at SwishData, a Warwick, N.Y.-based solution provider who has worked with and at Riverbed for years.

“Streamlining the number of people that they have in the program, the number of channel partners, benefits the ones that that get to stay in, which makes sense,” Shafer said. “They’re probably the better ones, right?”

Riverbed One, rather than being a giant, wide-open program where everybody’s in and has to be sorted via discounts and certifications, is now much simpler, Shafer said.

“When you’ve got just a tremendous number of channel partners in the program, you create ways that those partners can try to differentiate themselves such as revenue levels or certifications or specializations,” he said. “Riverbed is getting rid of all that and just moving with a smaller group of partners and focusing them on the markets where they’re effective. We can focus on winning the business and not on who is going to compete with me.”