NetApp EMEA partner boss: 'Our portfolio is standing out above the competition during this crisis'
Storage vendor's VP of EMEA organisation opens up to CRN on not following rival Nutanix's decision to furlough staff and how it is helping partners through the crisis
The COVID-19 crisis has proven the strength of NetApp's portfolio against its rivals, according to the VP of its EMEA organisation Kristian Kerr.
Rival Nutanix announced earlier this week that it would be furloughing staff in the US and asking non-US employees to take unpaid leave. Kerr was coy to comment to CRN on its rival's misfortunes but said that NetApp has "no current plans" to follow suit.
"I can only make comments on NetApp and, if you look at our portfolio, the strength of it is really beginning to stand out above the competition, especially in this current climate," he stated.
"Customers and partners are looking more and more to us about, how we can support them in these situations when customers need to move stuff from on-prem to off-prem to hybrid environments, and then into the public cloud and NetApp is extremely well-positioned in that space."
The vendor has put in place a number of initiatives to assist partners in the aftermath of the pandemic, including extending partner credit terms by 30 days for direct purchasing partners, compliance deadline extensions and education on social selling opportunities.
The demand for the latter initiative took NetApp by surprise as partners clamoured to develop their social selling abilities, Kerr said.
"That actually caught us slightly by surprise," he stated.
"Many partners don't have the maturity of NetApp in terms of social selling so we're helping them build a bigger social presence and providing the training and support so they can go out and use their social platforms to promote their brands and sell NetApp.
"Given that everybody's stuck at home, we're providing the tools so our partners can continue to proactively gauge and sell into their customer base, albeit remotely."
European withdrawal
Last year the storage vendor announced its physical withdrawal from a number of countries across Europe, including Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway, instead adopting a "partner-led" strategy in those regions.
Kerr said that this strategy has "gone exactly to plan" and he has been fielding calls from other vendors intrigued by the move.
"We took the decision based on the strength of our partners and distributors in those countries to effectively let them lead the sales process," he explained.
"In the first few months, my phone was ringing fairly hot with a lot of peers in the industry who were looking at doing something similar.
"How business has continued is a really strong sign of the commitment and loyalty of the partners and distributors that we have. We've continued to provide them with the right programmes, the right incentives and the right trading platforms for them to remain profitable and continue to represent us in those countries."
This model allowed NetApp's channel to become independent and enabled them to weather the coronavirus that has swept across the globe, in spite of the vendor's absence in their countries.
"The countries where we withdrew a year ago, the distributors and partners have been more self-sufficient because they haven't had the direct presence and coverage from local teams," he stated.
"They've had to make do with us providing all the information, the collaterals, the training, all the education. We do the enablement activities centrally to our distributors in all the different countries and then they'll go and then amplify that to their ecosystem.
"I would say if anything, they're far more advanced because they had to embrace that model of working 12 months ago."