Rancher Labs Expands Container-Management Reach With New Partner Program

**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of September’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

Rancher Labs, a provider of container management software, on Tuesday launched its first formal partner program with initial partners from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The Rancher Partner Network will support consultancies and SIs, as well as resellers and service providers globally. Rancher allows partners to deliver “container-based solutions using the customer’s choice of orchestration tool,” the company said.

Shannon Williams, Rancher’s co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing, tells Channel Partners his company has seen demand for container-management services take off in the last year, particularly those built around Kubernetes. The company works natively with Kubernetes, along with Mesos and Docker Swarm.

“Enterprise customers who may have spent 2014 or 2015 investigating containers in a non-production capacity are now starting to bring them into their CI/CD pipelines, to make sure they’re taking advantage of all the benefits containers have to offer in production — and Rancher is the perfect platform to help them to do that,” he said. “At the same time, we’re still a relatively young company — we want to scale and be able to meet growing demand for Rancher, but be nimble and focused enough to deliver the best product we can. Our partners help us do that by being experts on containers and on Rancher, and using our solution alongside their additional expertise.”{ad}

The program is launching with about 12 partners, including consulting partners, MSPs and resellers.

Partners benefit from a variety of sales, marketing, product, training and support programs aimed at helping them ensure customer success while capturing a greater share of the container marketplace, according to Rancher. Additionally, members of the service provider program have access to a pricing model specifically designed for and exclusively available to that community.

“Partners of all types, as well as our customers, have to constantly make choices for which container technologies to use in a really crowded marketplace,” Williams said. “Rancher works with many of those solutions – numerous orchestrators, storage and networking options, older DevOps technologies, even some PaaSes – to alleviate pressure to make the right decision, right now. We’re 100 percent open source so users can focus more on delivering the applications for their business, and less on tooling decisions. This program means our joint customers can quickly and easily implement a private container service, and get on with business.”

“Containers are an important part of our cloud strategy, and we depend on our partner Rancher to make them easy to use and manage,” said Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo. “The service provider program provides a flexible product with an equally flexible pricing model and support, making it a perfect and future-proofed fit for our cloud computing efforts.”