Atlassian Updates Partner Program With Improved Training, Rewards

Enterprise software vendor Atlassian is unveiling a redesigned partner program to ensure partners can more clearly explain their relationship to the company to implement, support and resell its products.

The Solution Partner Program will officially launch in January 2017, with compliance dates for existing partners in July 2017 (current Tier 1-3) and December 2017 (current Tier 3 with a Platinum badge).

Martin Musierowicz, Atlassian’s head of global channels, tells Channel Partners his company doesn’t have traditional sales, marketing or professional services organizations, and relies on partners to provide many of the “higher touch points.”

“We wanted to accomplish two main goals with the redesigned program: first, ensure that we can provide training that allows our partners to augment the Atlassian business model by launching our new accreditation programs through our new Charlie Academy platform; (and) second, recognize and reward partners for having certified skills on their staff, and not just judge them on transactional volume,” he said. “Investing in both is of great benefit to our customers, as they can rest assured that our partners are validated on their skills and capabilities.”{ad}

Charlie Academy is a new learning management system (LMS) specifically designed for partners with new individual accreditations.

“Charlie Academy is focused on developing product and solutions expertise of individuals within a partner organization, whereas traditional competencies are earned at the company level,” Musierowicz said. “It allows us to provide accreditation based on a partner’s skills and experience that is tested after each learning module. Additionally, Charlie Academy serves up role-specific learning paths to address the learning needs of each role within the partner. Utilizing our LMS, we are rolling out tracks for sales, technical and operational functions within our new and existing partners.”

Atlassian has more than 450 partners servicing customers in more than 115 countries. Its partner community provides customers with consulting, implementation and training services around the Atlassian stack, as well as expertise in building offerings for software, IT and business teams, Musierowicz said.

“Our partners range from boutique SIs that may specialize in Agile, ITSM or DevOps, to large regional SIs that include Atlassian as part of a standard platform for development and collaboration, but all are focused on providing services rather than just being transaction vehicles,” he said. “Additionally, we are seeing an increased demand for Atlassian’s enterprise products, such as data center, which require more skilled partners that are familiar with enterprise scaling and…

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…performance tuning. Outside of technical skills, partners are also regionally focused and play an important role for us in emerging markets such as Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. They invest in language support and provide a local presence in countries that require an additional touch point.”

Program levels recognize each partner’s individual depth of expertise and experience with Atlassian products. Silver Solution Partners can be niche consulting organizations with particular specializations or companies with a new relationship with Atlassian, while Gold Solution Partners are trained and committed to their Atlassian practice, and delivering value to our customers, according to the company.

Platinum Solution Partners have met the company’s highest training criteria and have a proven practice that can scale from small to large customers. They have an established run rate of Atlassian business and are suitably resourced to manage a wide range of customer offerings.{ad}

“The redesign of the program allows Atlassian to better onboard and enable individuals at our partners, ensuring that they have the skills to be successful,” Musierowicz said. “It allows them to be more effective more quickly, whether they are an existing partner or have newly joined the program, as the learning paths are continually updated with new and relevant content.”