Aveva Offers First Look at New Partner Program, Changes to Channel Strategy

Industrial software provider Aveva is working on a new, simplified partner program that integrates the different components of its industrial software business.

Aveva’s design and engineering, PI System and HMI SCADA businesses have historically had different channel strategies. Now, the firm is aiming to bring the three together in a single go-to-market, said Bry Dillon, SVP, partners and business development at Aveva.

Dillon was speaking to Channel Futures at last week's Aveva World 2023 in San Francisco. He said the new Aveva partner program is part of efforts to align the go to market strategies of the different components of the business.

This year the firm adopted a “segmentation strategy,” said Dillon. “The primary goal is making sure that we have consistency in how we approach our customers, and then we can service them in a way that’s not confusing.”

Dillon said segmentation “gives visibility and clarity” to partners into where Aveva has resources, where it is continuing to drive a direct strategy, and where there is opportunity to pursue customers.

Aveva's Bry Dillon

“The HMI SCADA business has a very long tail, lots of accounts," said Dillon. "There’s a portion of that business that overlaps with the PI business, but vast majority of accounts don’t. The segmentation strategy allows us to look at ‘here’s where we’re going to have overlap. Let’s make sure we’re coordinating on how we go to market with those accounts.’ And we can service the customer, how they want to be serviced, that supports their buying preferences.”

New Aveva Partner Program

The new Aveva partner program is due to roll out in 2024. Within it, Dillon said partners will be able to traverse different categories or segmentation.

“My goal is to really simplify our internal structure to make sure we understand why we partner with companies, then putting the right programs in place to help enable and support them,” he said.

“We have partners today that resell our technology. They also OEM our technology, and they do services around our technology. They do all three things. I’m focused on building programs internally that say, ‘If the reason you’re partnering with us is to do deployments or provide consulting and services, here’s the single way in which you can go through our certification process. You can pick which products to be certified in, which area of expertise, and you walk through that. If your goal is to resell our technology, then we have reselling programs. If you want to do both, that’s fine. We’re trying to make it so it’s really simple.”

Diverse Partner Ecosystem

During the event, Aveva CEO Caspar Herzberg praised he diversity of the firm’s partner ecosystem.

“We’re extremely fortunate that we have a very diverse and very large channel community for a business our size,” he told Channel Futures. “But what differentiates us from others is that we have bigger companies, integrators, but also this large group of family-owned businesses with really deep skills in a certain industry in a certain geography. It’s this diversity of channels that we are very proud of, and we want to maintain, and we want to grow.”

In his keynote, Herzberg laid out the company’s strategy of "design, operate and optimize." Aveva wants customers to use its software to expose different data sets across the organization to analyze and better leverage it for business and operational insight.

To achieve this, Dillon said Aveva needs the “the scope and scale of our partners to allow us to unlock that [Connect] platform opportunity.”

Aveva Partners Driving Data Opportunities

Aveva has approximately 5,000 partners globally, primarily comprising systems integrators (SIs), but it also has VARs, ISVs and OEMs.

“SI is huge for the HMI SCADA business. It’s going to be huge to the platform business," said Dillon. "Also, the ISV becomes interesting, particularly for the platform business. As you start to expose data beyond its initial use, that opens up a whole new area of opportunity for customers. [They can] reap the benefits of their data in new and interesting ways without disrupting the applications on prem.

“Our challenge is to expose [data] in a scalable, secure way that’s actionable," he added. "It’s in silos right now; it’s hard to bring it together in a normalized way. There’s a lot of work to be done so you can start to take advantage of things like Gen AI and some of these newer technologies. Because the data of cleanliness of the data and the data has no context, it’s really hard to use some of those toolsets.

“So partners become more important than they’ve ever been for us. Because there’s no way that Aviva could ever be able to fully realize the value of that data on our own. We want to have a rich partner ecosystem that enables us to drive that opportunity for our customers," noted Dillon.

Doubling Down On Partners

Elsewhere, chief product officer Rob McGreevy said Aveva is steering its partners away from selling perpetual software licenses to subscriptions-based, recurring revenues. Alongside the new Aveva partner program, it is part of driving growth in its channel business.

“We have no plans to grow our services business,” said Dillon. “We want to leverage the partner ecosystem for services. We want to scale our software platform through partners. We want to scale with the partners for services. We want to scale it through partners with applications. As we move to toward this hybrid platform opportunity, we really have to double down on our partner ecosystem, primarily in value added services, so that customers can get the full value of what of the data that they have.

“Being able to do that at scale means that we have to be open to partnering with anybody," said Dillon. "Even companies that we compete with in certain areas, because it’s in the best interest of our customers.”