EC News DeskThales’ Cloud Protection & Licensing combines the industry-leading data protection, access management, and software protection portfolios of Gemalto and Thales eSecurity. Launched in February this year, the idea behind Thales Accelerate Partner Network is to bring two very strong vendor programmes under one unit, and to facilitate that, we have redefined partner benefits and levels of accreditations.
One of the most important aspects of the new programme are the benefits associated with registering the deals, which brings partners much closer to us and our sales force. As the partners start working on a deal, they register it with us via the partner portal linked to our CRM, granting them access to additional benefits and deal protection in a competitive market.
The new Thales Accelerate Partner Network offers generous margins and services opportunities to boost our partners’ profitability. The revamped partner programme provides Resellers the required certification and enablement training to help partners build the skills needed to successfully deliver our solutions.
Partners are provided access to free, online sales and pre-sales technical training for partner sales representatives and sales engineers. From a marketing perspective, our network will have access to more tools for turnkey campaigns and content, such as our new partner webinar series. Additionally, there’s a new Thales CPL website, which will provide more recourses to the partner programme.
The whole idea for revamp is also to embrace one of the biggest market drivers that we see at the moment, especially in this part of the world, which is cloud migration. In terms of the models of delivery, our solutions, mainly Data Protection and Access Management, have also expanded into subscription type offerings.
We have seen that Access Management solutions have experienced an acceleration from Q1 onwards. The product is quite suited for remote working, as it is offered both on premise and as a service.
Thales Accelerate Partner Network, which was a rather timely introduction, offers training courses, campaign management tools, access to webinars and other content which has been supporting the network.
There have been situations where we have delivered on time, only to have been delayed by customs or couriers in some countries. The same rings true for collections where there have been a few isolated requests for changed terms or requests for extensions, but overall, these have been healthy and strong as well.
The main challenge has been dealing with the shift in priorities of companies. Suddenly, companies around the world have had to set up remote working facilities for their staff. While most have had to build a secure work-from-home network from scratch, others have had to extend their existing network to support the much larger work force. This change in priorities has been where Access Management has thrived to a large extent.
With the rapidly dynamic situation we find ourselves in right now, we have all had to evolve quite quickly. The Thales Accelerate Partner Network is specifically designed to support our partners as they transition to this new normal – to upskill and familiarise themselves with the new Thales products and features.
A key priority for us is to strengthen the partner network with trainings, messaging workshops, marketing tools and relevant content that will help our partners to further support their customer base through an accelerated digital transformation as they transition to cloud or hybrid cloud models. In Q3, we will be introducing more flexible and merged solutions so our partners and customers can stay ahead of the curve.
