I’ll get to the point: You and our other channel partners are showing exceptionally high pipeline growth in Q2 for Quest products like these:

• Anything with a security profile. That means OneIdentity, KACE/endpoint security and products related to Active Directory (AD).
• Remote management. That’s no surprise, since the dust hasn’t yet settled on #WorkFromHome and IT managers are still figuring out their new normal. Our channel is showing double-digit pipeline growth for products like Foglight and the KACE Systems Deployment Appliance.
• SaaS and anything related to managed services. You’re reporting huge pipeline gains over just a few months ago in an area where the numbers have usually been low.

Those are a few of the highlights in our FY21 Q2 webcast for channel partners, now available on demand. I’ll recap other highlights of the call below.

Trimming months off the sales cycle

In a recent quote, Satya Nadella of Microsoft said IT has seen “two years of digital transformation in [the last] two months.” That’s a lot of sysadmins scrambling all at once.

Despite a mild, year-on-year slowdown in bookings in Q2 so far, Quest overall is positive and channel is a big part of the 88% YoY growth we’re seeing this quarter. What are you and your fellow channel partners doing to generate so much pipeline?

• Training. Partners who take the training in our Partner Circle are generating a lot of it. We’ve built entire Campaigns in a Box with white papers, playbooks and call scripts around our solution areas. Partners who are digging into those resources are building pipeline fast.
• Business planning. Silver partners with business plans can qualify for our FastPath to Silver program. When you demonstrate your commitment to training and to creating a business plan around selling our products, we reward you by waiving revenue requirements for our Silver tier.
• Silver partners who have business plans and work closely with our sales team are eligible for leads generated from our website. Lead passing is at the discretion of each sales team, which is why collaboration is important.

Those three things put you on the path to MDF, rebates, additional discounts and more pipeline.

As Todd Werner, our VP of channels mentioned, “I’ve seen deals close in May that weren’t expected until October.” We have a waterfall of leads coming in through the website, and we share them primarily with Silver partners. Now is the time to get together with your local resources and adjust your business plans to focus on the hot solution areas of security, endpoint management and AD.

Quest now has a chief revenue officer

Greg Randolph, our recently named CRO, emphasized Quest’s momentum toward growth through our sales channel. We’re investing more in demand generation with channel partners to drive up business.

He pointed out that many companies are tired of being in the data center business and are moving to the cloud as quickly as possible. Quest products reduce the complexity that comes from moving to the cloud, whether pure-play or through hybrid data centers, while protecting data throughout the migration process.

Greg’s advice is to stay in close touch with your customers, whose landscape and problems are almost certainly different today from what they were four months ago (and from what they’ll be four months from now).

If you’re not selling KACE, maybe you should be

In the webcast, KACE sales leaders Oliver Stairmand and Sashi Silbergleith described three recent, high-profile channel deals for KACE products:

• A health care company in Germany had to deploy and manage several hundred devices for use outside the local network because of the coronavirus lockdown. The 500-license SDA/SMA deal took just three weeks, from initial partner contact through overview, proof of concept, order and installation.
• In the eastern U.S., an auto dealer wanted to roll out a new fleet of mobile devices to maintain social distancing, while continuing to sell vehicles. The result was an SMA deal for 3,000 devices that closed in the same quarter in which it came to us.
• A channel partner was engaged in selling 15,000 devices to a school district in the western U.S. With the future unclear, the district wanted the devices to be secure, whether distance learning continues next school year or the devices come back into the classroom. Including a one-week trial, the turnaround time for the order was less than 30 days.

See? There are KACE deals to be made — fast! — and partners like you are making them.

Channel opportunities in Data Protection

John O’Boyle, our sales director for data protection in EMEA, spoke to two trends that spell opportunity for the Quest channel.

First, that “whoosh” you hear is the sound of companies adopting Office 365. Not only has the lockdown accelerated adoption, but Microsoft has also extended its six-months-free licensing. But IT organizations are realizing that the backup and recovery they have in place isn’t well suited to Office 365. Fortunately, you can sell NetVault for Office 365, with deduplication, faster restore and competitive pricing. A UK government account recently inked a deal through a channel partner for 4,000 users.

The other trend will never go away: companies trimming budgets or looking for ways to get the most out of the money they spend. Foglight Evolve gives IT a full view of on-prem, virtual and cloud environments. More important, it spots overused or underused resources, identifies trends for better spending and enables admins to compare costs across different cloud platforms. A U.S. carpet company with 5,000 VMs used Foglight Evolve to shave a TB off of its memory usage and several TB off its storage requirements. Within 30 days, Foglight had paid for itself.

What’s top of mind in Information Management?

Manuel Nadal directs sales of Information Management products for Quest in EMEA. He described the three most common questions his group is hearing from customers:

• “How do we support our databases remotely?” This is a matter of business continuity and keeping your databases running properly even when your database professionals are working remotely. And, on a related note, we’re seeing high demand for the performance tuning needed to avoid outages and keep application users happy. In our Partner Circle you’ll find a Campaign in a Box on remote database support.
• “How can our database professionals stay productive when working from home?” IT departments managing hundreds or thousands of databases worry about the database server going down and taking multiple applications with it. Look for our Campaign in a Box on this topic.
• “Why are our monthly cloud bills so high? How did we miss these costs in our estimate?” Sticker shock is rampant among cloud migration customers. Quest products are designed for right-sizing and stress-testing cloud services before migration, and for identifying more efficient SQL statements after migration.

The time is right to start those conversations. We have campaigns, materials and assets to persuade your customers and the products to close deals with them.

Q&A

You asked a few questions on the call, and I’ll summarize the answers here:

“How do I maximize my profitability with Quest?”

When you take the training, develop a business plan and work closely with our sales teams, you can move up the partner tiers for access to lead passing, discounts and rebates. Keep in mind also that Quest offers professional services, but we’d rather have you offer them. Providing services can be a big component of profitability.

“What does Quest have for managed service partners?”

Quest has an MSP program for faster ramp-up. We’re building MSP-specific features into our products, designed to simplify administration and billing. Our subscription-based license model allows MSPs to enter markets more easily. Finally, we have dedicated account managers who support MSPs in activities like quoting, training and escalation.

“Why don’t we receive email from Quest?”

Don’t take it personally. It could be that you’ve inadvertently unsubscribed, so go back into the Partner Circle and update your subscription details. We know you don’t want to receive a zillion messages per month from Quest, so we’re cautious about frequency. The best way to get our information is from our occasional email messages. And from this blog.

Coming up next

Later this summer, we’ll host another webcast with a sneak peek at Quest’s rebranding effort. Don’t worry – you won’t have to discard your data sheets or have materials reprinted. We’re updating our messages to align them with long-term trends in enterprise IT and some of the topics I’ve outlined above. Sign up now and save the date: August 12, 11:00 a.m. Eastern time.

See how much news you miss when you can’t attend our regular webcasts? Fortunately, last month’s is still available on demand. Give it a listen, then sit down with your money guy and your sales guy and get to work on that business plan. It’s the key to discounts, rebates, Silver status and lead passing.