#125 Ash Vijayakanthan: Single Products Are Out: We’re in a World of Solutions Now

Ash has a bold vision for partnering: the time for selling single products is gone. The new standard is co-selling joint solutions with partners. We agree! After many years of leading partnering at Microsoft, Citrix, and Cloudera, today Ash leads Trifacta’s ecosystem and partner team building joint partner solutions to satisfy fast-changing customer needs.

In this episode, Ash Vijayakanthan, Vice President at Trifacta, joins Ecosystem Aces and discusses how the company creates a successful partner and customer experience.

Ash shares:

• How the new world of solutions requires optimizing partnerships
• How Trifacta measures and supports their ecosystem’s success
• How Trifacta’s strategic partnership with Google enhanced their entire ecosystem

Measuring and Supporting Partner Success

There is no magic bullet for measuring partner success. Because of this, Trifacta doesn’t use a single indicator for partner success and instead evaluates partners on multiple metrics. A key metric that Trifacta pays close attention to is renewal performance. In a new landscape of subscription models and creating solutions for full customer lifecycles, convincing customers to continue to use solutions is essential. Trifacta understands that partners who take this responsibility seriously reduce a significant workload for the company.

Another way Trifacta measures partner value is how well partners train their employees and how many of their employees get a certification for Trifacta’s products. The company believes that partners who train well and have more employees certified are more capable of explaining to customers the value of their products. Other indicators that Trifacta measures include deal registration, business planning as well as customer satisfaction retention.

Evaluating your partner’s value is crucial to maximizing your joint solutions, but equally important is how you support your partners. Trifacta recognized that their previous partner programs were too complex causing a cumbersome and slow process for partners to start collaborating with the company. Simplifying their partner experience has significantly increased the number of Trifacta partners and allowed them to focus simply on driving value for their customers.

Enhancing Ecosystems with Strategic Partnerships

Strategically forming the right partnerships can uplift your entire ecosystem. Trifacta’s partnership with Google includes launching a new product update that is heavily complimented by Google BigQuery. This new product update has allowed customers to optimize and sort through their data warehouse. In addition, the company’s partners were also able to discover new use cases with the updated product and develop their own new solutions. Most notably, a select group of partners has taken these capabilities to the marketing analytics space. This is a new vertical that Trifacta was previously not as active in before the Google Partnership.

Trifacta’s partnership with Google also enhances the company’s data preparation capabilities. Especially in rapidly growing fields such as AI and ML, where quality of data is critical. Being able to effectively leverage their partnership with Google gives Trifacta credibility and net new opportunities.

Optimizing Partnerships in the World of Solutions

In this new landscape, maximizing your potential revenue means leveraging your product with your partners to co-build and co-sell a joint solution. Trifacta understands that as valuable as their data prep capabilities are, they are exponentially more valuable to the end customer when they are put in a position to enhance and be enhanced by a partner's product.

Co-building effective solutions means not just ensuring a seamless integration but also considering the ease of use, the speed at which it allows customers to get to their solutions, and how it can be usable for the whole company versus just a small set of users. This is the value that Trifacta drives for partners and an essential value for customers.

To contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest, or join the conversation about alliances, he can be reached by:

Email: chip@workspan.com

Twitter: @chiprodgers

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chiprodgers

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