Greg Chappell, Vice President of Sales and Partner Success at Think On, Inc.
What makes a powerful channel partner? People. At ThinkOn, our resellers are as individual as the people and services that drive their organizations. As a partner, you deserve individual attention when you contact a provider, and that’s what you get when you work with ThinkOn—people who care and bring their unique skills and expertise to the solutions your customers need to thrive.
As a leader of a specialized team focused on enabling global and regional partners to be prosperous with ThinkOn cloud computing solutions and services, I’ve made partner success our top priority. That’s why we’ve adopted a “Channel-First” focus that is as world-class as the resellers we serve.
At ThinkOn, we’ve created a list of reasons why our resellers love working with us as their channel partner. Here’s the top ten to get you started.
1. Hello? Hello? Is anyone listening?
Have you ever tried to contact a big hyperscaler, and find yourself trapped in a never-ending series of automated menus, only to have your call dropped without ever getting an answer to your questions? Or worse, finding yourself lost in a voicemail rabbit hole that leads to nowhere. That doesn’t happen here at ThinkOn. We’re people, not bots. When you reach out to us, you always get to talk to a real person—an expert who will listen and advise.
Resellers are the lifeblood of our business, and we treat you like the VIP partners you are—every time. And because every reseller is precious to us, ThinkOn won’t squeeze you out in favor of bigger, “more profitable” businesses. We take a custom approach to every partner, solution, and customer service transaction, and never categorize our relationships like some providers.
Resellers are like family: we love them all equally and we’re committed to helping every one of them thrive and grow.
2. The Aha! moment
We’re always looking for better, simpler ways to communicate with our resellers, so we’re excited to launch a new portal that captures your ideas and requests in a quick and easy way. The ThinkOn Ideas portal collects all your awesome ideas in a single place and feeds them directly into the roadmap, should we decide to implement them. There’s no waiting, no calls on hold, no chatbot bugging you to engage. Just a fast way to give us your input that gets immediate attention from our product team.
3. Honey, I shrunk the margins…
Resellers want proven capabilities to deliver consistent revenue, profit, and market share outcomes. So why are other providers shrinking margins and leaving resellers out in the cold?
Hyperscale cloud margins are small and getting smaller, usually three percent—if they exist at all anymore. At ThinkOn, our margins are healthy—we’re talking double-digits. That’s how we honor our channel partner partnerships and help you grow your business.
4. Crush complexity–and beat the competition
Our ability to cut through the complexity is a big reason our resellers love to work with us as their channel partner. Simplicity in the cloud helps our partners save time, money, and loads of frustration. If you’ve ever tried to navigate the service catalogs of the big three, you’ll know the complexity we’re talking about: building out your cloud services offerings and adding to your portfolio with the big clouds can lead to project paralysis, escalating budgets, and the introduction of risk resellers.
At ThinkOn, we don’t let that happen. Our services fit together to create an economical, buildable outcome that makes sense for the end user and their bottom line. We make it easy to expand your services and add to your portfolio, serving simplicity in four ways:
- transparent quoting and invoicing
- a streamlined services catalog and “solutions-in-a-box” approach
- a tested and successful go-to-market strategy
- interactive live support with real people
5. You’re in good company with ThinkOn as your channel partner
You’re never alone with ThinkOn as your channel partner. Our strategic vendor relationships with innovative technology partners guarantee high-quality solutions and services. We work with the best to build the best solutions for our resellers.
Our technology alliances include Hitachi, VMware, Veeam, Zerto, Megaport, Commvault, Dell, Lenovo, and many more. These industry leaders form the backbone of our infrastructure and cloud data managed services to form an innovative and modern solution stack–tailored to the needs of each customer. Solutions are implemented within the ThinkOn service delivery architecture and sold by our resellers across the globe.
ThinkOn is VMware Verified and a member of VMware’s Cloud Advisory Board. As a VMware Cloud Verified Provider and VMware Principal Partner, ThinkOn offers easy access to the full set of interoperable VMware Cloud Infrastructure capabilities, delivered as a service.
6. True hybrid design for fit-to-purpose solutions
Successful enterprises don’t run in a vacuum. Collaboration helps make a company efficient and profitable. That means integrated communication among Sales, Marketing, Finance, IT, Engineering, Operations, and the C-suite. We work with your entire team to seamlessly manage on-premises or multi-tenant/dedicated cloud infrastructure and design solutions that grow business, save time, and implement future-proof technology.
Together, we focus on leveraging data to realize business outcomes with a hybrid cloud model that optimizes data storage solutions in a secure and fully scalable solution, unique to the needs of the business. ThinkOn’s DRaaS, BaaS, IaaS, Cloud Sovereignty, and data security solutions help grow your business with total solutions that fit the customers’ needs now and well into the future. See our full suite of products and services.
7. Public sector security in the cloud
At ThinkOn, we’re experts in public sector cloud management, governance, and security. It’s practically in our DNA—we’ve been offering advanced cybersecurity cloud services and software to federal, provincial, and municipal governments, police and healthcare organizations, financial services and educational institutions, and other public sector entities for years.
Our dedicated team of data experts is “compliance centric,” so you don’t have to worry about meeting regulatory requirements—we’re on the job 24/7, making sure all the boxes are ticked and the reporting data you need is at the ready.
Glenn Kemp, Managing Director for immigration consultants Clear Concepts, relies on our expertise to secure his company’s data, “We partnered with ThinkOn for cloud services because their security is topnotch, their support is exceptional, and their pricing is on point.”
Other providers promise full data sovereignty, traceability, and supply chain management, but you might want to double-check their claims. ThinkOn provides full global data sovereignty—without relying on offshore resources that could jeopardize security.
8. As you channel partner, we coddle your budget–and keep your finance team out of the fright zone
The typical hyperscale cloud customer incurs 10 to 20 percent in unpredictable variable costs per month. With numbers like that, opening a cloud bill can send you and your customer into a fright night double feature. We know the negative impact that can have on our resellers’ businesses, so we keep our prices reasonable and guarantee transparent pricing with no hidden fees. Your bills won’t fluctuate, and neither will your customers’.
Enterprise cloud spending has skyrocketed by 24 percent in recent years.[i] Companies are all too often horrified to find their API and egress charges are more than their storage costs. As your channel partner, we never charge ingress or egress fees—it’s your data, so why should you pay fees to access it? With our no-hidden-fees policy, our resellers can guarantee predictable monthly billing, not a billed per hour or per minute surprise at the end of the billing cycle.
9. At ThinkOn, silence is golden
Peace of mind means never having to watch your back. Some hyperscalers think it’s okay to run an endgame around you and cut you out of the business you’ve earned. At ThinkOn, it’s all about YOU. Our white label service ensures that you’ll never be left out of the play.
For us, Channel-First means Channel-Only, so we work with you, the reseller. Your customers are yours, your contracts belong to you, and that’s the way it stays. No one else needs to know we exist, but we’re behind you all the way—to simplify, support, and customize your customer’s needs.
10. When our reseller wins, that’s a big win for ThinkOn
At ThinkOn, we know that we only succeed if our partners succeed, so we do whatever it takes to help you be successful. We love talking to resellers because we want to help them build long-standing relationships that grow their business and safeguard their customers.
When you partner with us, you join a community that cares and works together to make us all stronger. With ThinkOn, you can expand your service portfolio, increase gross margins, and accelerate customer outcomes that help you gain more business.
Speak to the real people at ThinkOn and join our Channel-First community. We make it easy to do business with us while we help expand your portfolio and support your business strategy.
[i] Synergy Research Group, “Q3 Cloud Spending Up Over $11 Billion from 2021 Despite Major Headwinds; Google Increases its Market Share.” https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/q3-cloud-spending-up-over-11-billion-from-2021-despite-major-headwinds-google-increases-its-market-share