AIOps Platform Vendor OpsRamp Courts VARs with New Partner Program

OpsRamp for the past few years has sold its AIOps-based platform to enterprises and MSPs. Now the seven-year-old company is aggressively growing its channel partner program to make a hard push for resellers.

OpsRamp on Thursday launched its new channel program that includes a single partner portal; a support program featuring sale support, education and customer onboarding; and co-marketing efforts with new go-to-market strategies, event opportunities and co-branded plans to accelerate demand generation. The goal is to grow the number of resellers for OpsRamp’s AIOps software as a service (SaaS) platform, according to Denny Riley, the company’s global channel vice president.

OpsRamp’s Denny Riley

“We’ve always really had the reseller aspect,” Riley told Channel Futures. “Some of the MSPs that were working with us over the long term had the resale business going, so they were doing some reseller business. But in the last year we’ve really started to put a push behind it. I have been assigned the job of bringing it together and recruiting. We’ve gone from probably two or three big sellers in the past six to seven months … to about 20 at this point in time.”

OpsRamp leverages AIOps technology in its OpsQ platform, which is armed with intelligent event management, alert and remediation capabilities to give enterprises and MSPs greater visibility into complex hybrid cloud and multicloud environments. With the platform, enterprises can provide IT operations as a service, including monitoring and management of services.

At the heart of it is AIOps, or artificial intelligence for IT operations, a fast-growing market segment that leverages analytics and machine learning to help organizations manage their IT environments at a time of rapid change driven by such trends as the cloud and data proliferation.

A recent report from Infoholics Research says the worldwide AIOps market will grow 33% per year between 2018 and 2024. A survey last year by OpsRamp found that 87% of technology professionals said that AIOps tools enable them to be more proactive in IT operations and they help eliminate low-value repetitive tasks, accelerate remediation and enable better infrastructure performance.

For OpsRamp, AIOps is the engine that drives its platform, Riley said.

“We are using AIOps specifically, as it is an engine to derive a great solution,” he said, adding that enterprises “need a solution that really helps them bring together their whole environment.”

Growing the business will mean growing the channel program. For most of its history, OpsRamp has sold directly to MSPs and enterprises, and considered MSPs as channel partners. However, Mike Munoz, who came aboard as the company’s chief revenue officer more than a year ago, has changed that thinking, viewing MSPs as customers and putting the channel focus on resellers and VARs, Riley said.

The new program comes with a host of resources aimed at sales and technical training, marketing and demand generation. The aim is to enable partners to develop expertise around hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructure management leveraging AIOps.

The company has had a partner program, but it primarily involved Riley trying to sell it to partners.

“We’re putting a lot of the time and energy into resources, a partner portal, specific communications,” he said.

One goal to be easy to work with, Riley said. There aren’t a lot of agreements for partners to sign and they can essentially try it on a trial basis by doing a deal or two with OpsRamp before signing a reseller contract. The vendor also plans to have …

… six or seven field representatives to work directly with partners on deals. Resellers can register a deal and then turn it over to one of the OpsRamp reps who will include the partner or sell it themselves, with the partner still getting the commission, Riley said.

The company has about 20 reseller partners and 40-50 MSP customers. The VARs are having a growing impact on OpsRamp’s bottom line, contributing about half of the company’s revenue in the last quarter, up from 10% they generated in 2018, he said.

OpsRamp has done a good job making partners feel like an extension of the company, according to Rick Campagna, regional vice president for Technologent, an IT services and solutions provider that focuses on such areas as data-center infrastructure, data protection, connectivity and cybersecurity. The 20-year-old company has been an OpsRamp partner for about six months.

“OpsRamp has developed a ‘one team’ mentality as it relates to their commitment to partners,” Campagna told Channel Futures. “The [go-to-market] process with their partners streamlines the OpsRamp/partner B2B interactions. By creating these streamlined processes, we as partners are afforded the opportunity to complete our registrations, trainings [and so on] in an accelerated fashion so we can collectively get back to the business of solving customer problems.”

In addition, the “simplicity designed by OpsRamp within [its] partner program cannot be overstated. It is extremely efficient and a model for other ISVs,” he said. That’s important when talking about AIOps.

“The opportunity for AIOps is enormous, especially as a service,” Campagna said. “With the complexities surrounding all the emerging technologies, how to utilize them efficiently and, more importantly, how to integrate them effectively into organizations’ complex workflows, AIOps is critical to this process. Existing IT operations are overwhelmed with deciding which AI products, services, support and integration plans best suit their business requirements.”