Centreon's UK channel manager shares his MSP strategy and what partners can expect

Juan Lyall spoke to us about the French IT monitoring vendor's channel plan for the UK, where it's investing, and what he thinks the next big trend to power MSPs’ sales growth will be

"When it comes to IT monitoring, free tools are not free," says Juan Lyall, Centreon's UK channel boss.

"And we're helping UK partners market this message when they talk to customers…Because there's a growing awareness here and an opportunity."

The France-HQ pan-European IT monitoring specialist has just started a new push to recruit more MSPs in a market it first landed in during 2020.

After two years of a "soft launch" to build brand awareness, Lyall told CRN sister site Channel Partner Insight that he's now looking to turbocharge growth with a target of a 300 per cent sales hike.

"This [the UK] is a really important market for us.

"We're hugely successful in France, but here we see that there is an important opportunity to grow. And that 300 per cent figure will be brought about by us investing in tools for partners here, and helping make it easier for them to market our product here."

Lyall pointed to investments already made over the past two years in-market in terms of a UK-based marketing team and a re-vamped partner portal geared towards UK MSPs.

Managed services

Lyall and his team were face-to-face with UK partners at last month's AWS London Summit.

He said it was clear that there are many who are still looking to get advice and training from vendors willing to help them pivot to more lucrative services.

"I'm not trying to teach partners their own business, but broadly speaking there is a challenge still within the partner community on how to really diversify into services. And outside of box shifting or licence shifting, which may be a better phrase, the drive to push services is still extremely relevant.

"And I think many businesses are actually still at the earliest stages of adopting that.

"And my message to all partners, no matter if they are resellers or where they are on that journey is that outside of our wonderful solution, we have a go-to-market business that is a really nice opportunity for them to grow their own services."

AWS Marketplace

A recent launch Lyall was also keen to highlight is Centreon Cloud: the vendor's cloud software as-a-service product.

Lyall says this is a recognition by them of the growing success of hyperscaler marketplaces - like AWS Marketplace - and their attractiveness to many IT procurement decision-makers within end user businesses.

"Our recent launch is being hosted in AWS at the moment, hence, our inclusion in that event, and we're getting a lot closer to them [AWS]. And I think that's really recognising where the market is going," he said.

"More people want that option to be able to go into AWS Marketplace and take something off the shelf. And they go for it there for a whole bunch of different reasons.

"So, we're not moving away from subscription licencing and on-prem - certainly not in the short or medium-term - but we are really embracing this opportunity to say, ‘Look, there are other things, and other ways in which you can consume our products."

UK and next EMEA footprint

Within the UK, its business is primarily in the public sector including higher education, the NHS and other Blue Light contracts - all through the channel.

It's a two-tier model with ABC Distribution as its partner in the UK.

Looking further afield, Lyall said Italy, Spain and Germany are other key EMEA markets the French company is looking to grow further in.

Outside its home market of France, Italy is currently the firm's largest market.

The company also has US operations after launching in North America three years ago.

Where next?

Digital transformation is a buzz-phrase that has powered many services vendors and their partners over the past two years.

But when asked "What's next?" Lyall throws up hybrid networking as the next big thing for the channel.

"This is top of mind, in my view, because a few years ago, we all had this vision that we'd all be in the cloud come three years' time.

"It's like in the 60s when we thought we'd all be living on the moon by now. But both of those visions didn't really pan out that way.

"In technology I think people are now looking at cloud and saying ‘Yes, it is absolutely the future, but not necessarily exclusively so'."

He added that this more nuanced view of cloud workloads, apps and the monitoring required for those, is an opportunity for Centreon MSPs.

"We can have this wider conversation that there is more to cloud that first thought. So, again what's top of mind for partners that we speak to is how can you address all those needs and requirements without either diluting yourself or contradicting yourself? That seems to be pretty important to people. And getting good answers on that and hybrid networking may help."

The background

Headquartered in Paris, Centreon was founded in 2005 by CEO Julien Mathis and co-president Romain Le Merlus.

The vendor specialises in providing IT monitoring for ‘always-on' operations.

It says its AIOPs-ready open-source software platform is built to monitor complex hybrid infrastructures from on-prem to multiple clouds.