Snapt Spreads Application Delivery Wings with New Partner Program

Snapt, a provider of solutions for application delivery, wants to be a disruptor in the application delivery controller (ADC) market and it’s building a partner channel to do that.

Founded in 2012, Snapt’s go-to-market strategy to date has been direct, primarily selling its products to small, medium and enterprise customers online. The company provides load balancing, web acceleration, caching and security, or application firewalling, for critical services.

“We’re young, we’re new to the space and we’re trying to disrupt it,” Dave Blakey, CEO and cofounder of Snapt, told us. “People come to us via word of mouth, modern channels such as MSPs and others, asking to resell the product or use the product in their deployments and services. So we’re building a proper partner program around that growing interest.”

The upstart reports having 10,000 customers across more than 50 countries. Snapt ADC powers fast, secure delivery of business-critical applications anytime, anywhere, on any device, platform or cloud-based infrastructure, the vendor said.

“Our premise is that everybody needs load balancing and application delivery. The question is, what does DevOps need? Well, the answer is, they need Snapt. And that’s our focus — we’re looking at what’s next,” Blakey said.

Dave Blakey

Dave Blakey

That means a change in the IT person addressing load balancing, which was the purview of network engineers.

“Now the client type is someone responsible for the delivery of applications, such as system and cloud architects, application owners — so the needs have changed largely because the people have changed,” he said.

A 2017 Application Delivery Controller Study by ZK Research finds the majority of ADCs are used on premises, but other form factors are emerging. Other results from the study: Incumbents still dominate in the cloud but challengers are coming on strong; respondents are experimenting with cloud, software and virtual form factors; and satisfaction with current vendors is tepid.

The Snapt Partner Program focus is on VARs and MSPs in North America. It’s based on a three-tier model – silver, gold and platinum – and offers co-marketing opportunities, deal registration, lead generation, sales, marketing and operational support, training, certification and 100-percent annual renewal. There’s also a Snapt partner portal.

The program provides lucrative growth opportunities for partners seeking to innovate, by offering comprehensive solutions for today’s application delivery challenges in a design that’s ready to carry products such as Citrix and F5. Snapt’s goal is to help its partners accelerate growth and revenue opportunities with a disruptive and easy-to-implement recurring service and revenue model. Snapt is a SaaS play with a yearly or monthly subscription.

Blakey notes that the company often competes against vendors such as Citrix, F5, Kemp Technologies and A10 Networks. So what’s the draw for partners?

“In some cases, we’re complementary – so clients may have an F5 solution in the front and Snapt is able to go closer to the network edge due to its lightweight software model. But then in other situations, we are competing directly against them,” Blake said. “It depends on the network deployment.”

Snapt partners can expect to talk more to the cloud architect who is steering the networks of tomorrow, or the existing modern ones.

“We’re born in the cloud and our products are designed to run in virtualized platforms,” he said.