Bryan Keepers
Director, Channel Sales Americas

Opengear’s channel program has continued to see exponential growth over the past few years. To continue to facilitate this and show our commitment to our partners, we’ve built a new Americas Value-Added Reseller Partner Program. Launched on March 1st, the enhanced Partner Program includes a new Reseller Elite tier and wide array of new benefits for all Opengear resellers. To learn more about it, I sat down with Bryan Keepers, Director of Channel Sales, Americas.

1. What was the catalyst that made you decide to enhance the Partner Program?

As our partnerships and revenue continue to grow, we feel that it’s important to continually add new benefits to the program. We also feel that it’s critical to reward our top partners who are most successful at positioning Opengear solutions as an essential component to network resilience strategies.

2. Can you discuss the new tier?

We’ve added a new tier to our program, Elite and enhanced the benefits in our Premier tier. Partners qualify for those levels based on several factors including the amount of Opengear solutions that they’ve sold in the previous year as well as our access to their sellers. Revenue and access dictate which tier they fall into. The overall relationship is ultimately the deciding factor into where they are placed in our program.

3. What are some of the new benefits of the Partner Program?

To decide on these new benefits, we took a look at what would really reward our partners and how we can better assist them. There’s a wide range of benefits and tier level dictates which are available to each partner.

Premier Partners receive:

• Access to lead sharing
• Co-branded marketing materials
• Live on-site training days
• Sales and technical certification programs
• Opportunities for market development funds

Elite Partners receive all the benefits that Premier Partners do along with:

• Receiving the highest level of discounts available for Opengear solutions
• Turn key demand generation campaigns
• Funding for product samples
• Additional invitations to our annual Partner Summit

Again, these are just a few of the benefits our partners will have access to with our new program.

4. What are some differentiators between Opengear’s Partner Program and others?

Our new program is unique in that both our partners and Opengear have more skin in the game. This will strengthen our relationships and also allow us to hold each other accountable for success together. Some of our main differentiators are:

• Opengear-hosted live trainings and certifications for both sales and solutions architects will help prepare Partner sellers to speak confidently about all of our solution offerings, such Smart Out-of-Band, Lighthouse Enterprise and Opengear in general
• Last year we added a dedicated Channel Sales Engineer. This has enabled us to provide our partners with in-depth answers to their technical answers quickly – without having to worry about listening to a sales pitch
• This year we are adding a Partner Advisory Council by invitation. Exclusively for our Elite Resellers, this will create another opportunity for us to jointly focus on what additional support is needed to help them sell Opengear solutions

5. Looking to the future, what are your ambitions for Opengear’s Partner Program?

Opengear is continually growing, just look at our recent acquisition by Digi, and our channel is a major factor in that growth. For the future, I’d like to continue to add activities and enhance our offerings to help better position our channel partners with the customers to win the business. We’ll realize the greatest success through continual communication and support.

To get all the details on our 2020 Value-Added Reseller Program for the Americas, take a look at our Partner Page!