Flexential Focused On Growth, Investing in Channel

Flexential, formerly Peak 10 + ViaWest, steadily has been adding new benefits and opportunities for partners since announcing its rebranding in January.

The hybrid IT provider has 41 data centers across 21 markets, and reaches more than 4,200 business customers. It offers colocation, cloud, connectivity, compliance and professional services.

At last week’s Channel Partners Conference and Expo, Pat Doherty, Flexential’s chief revenue officer, and Tamara Prazak, its director of channel strategy, talked about the company’s consolidated partner program and increased value proposition.

Flexential’s Pat Doherty and Tamara Prazak at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo

Prazak said the channel is a critical component of her company’s go-to-market, and “with the investments that we’re making, we’ve doubled down and doubled the size of our channel team, so we’re extremely committed to the channel.”

“Channel represents a force multiplier for our direct sales force, so it just helps us with our growth trajectory and the huge goals we set up,” she said.

Flexential had two “very established” partner programs and has combined them into one, Doherty said. The company has invested in national partner management, complemented by regional partner management, he said. It also has invested more in marketing and engineering support.

“We’ve really just said, ‘How do we go and apply the resources necessary to really go have a channel program that’s of the scale of the new Flexential,” he said. “And I think we’ve now given more options [to] our partners so they have choices among agreements that best fit their business model, and made sure we are a comp-mutual business so we have good synergies between the partners that we’re recruiting as well as our embedded sales force.”

Partners have responded favorably to combining the two businesses and the “scale that we now have to offer them,” Doherty said.

“So from having access to (more data centers), our compelling cloud story with 13 nodes that we have for the cloud and our tremendous network … that broad portfolio of colocation, cloud, connectivity and professional services gives them a really differentiated offering that they can tap [into] and then bring out to their customers,” he said. “And then when we look at it, we’ve got an industry-leading net promoter score, so our partners know that when they bring Flexential to bear with their customer base, that we’re not going to let them down. We’re a very dependable partner.”

As for Flexential’s overall business strategy, the company is “very much in growth mode,” Doherty said.

“We’re largely located in tier 2 markets, so we’re continuing to invest tremendously into our edge data-center capabilities,” he said. “More and more of our customers are now going from single data center to say, smaller, diversified data centers that are located closer to the edge to meet environments of their end users, and so we will continue to go invest in our facilities, our data-center locations. We’re strong in tier 2 and we’ll obviously keep a keen eye on opportunities in tier 1 markets also. But for us it’s really all about …

… investment and growth.”

Flexential also plans to invest more in the back office, Doherty said.

“We’ve kind of focused very much on the front as we brought these two business together, so as we move into the future, we will go and continue to invest in the back office to make sure that we’re being as easy to do business with as possible for our partners,” he said.

Flexential has many national partners, as well as regional partners, and “although they’re regional, many of their customers have locations that are dispersed across the United States,” Doherty said.

“So with our scale, somebody who may have had customers who were largely focused in the East, but may have also had requirements – whether it be for colocation or for diversity, for disaster recovery – now has that opportunity to go tap into this fleet of 41 data centers across the country,” he said.