Information Builders Unleashes New Global Partner Program

Information Builders, the business intelligence (BI), analytics and data management provider, is rolling out its new global partner program designed to attract partners and drive their success.

Through the program, partner businesses will have the opportunity to “monetize data and create new revenue streams” by creating, building and selling products and projects that tap into Information Builders’ data-management and analytics offerings.

Information Builders’ Frank Vella

Information Builders also recently appointed Frank Vella as CEO, succeeding company founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. Vella is charged with driving growth, building on an established customer-focused culture and leading the company to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. He joined Information Builders as chief operating officer a little more than a year ago.

Pat Bernard, Information Builders’ senior vice president of global partner business, tells Channel Partners the new global program is “an evolution to Information Builders’ existing program.”

“What we are launching goes well beyond a classic partner program, partner types/tiers with associated benefits and qualifications,” she said. “We are a newly energized, private software company whose mission is to grow. We sought to develop a program best aligned with repositioning the company to have a partner-driven go-to-market strategy, a partner-centric culture, and to make the necessary transformational investments.”

The program supports a wide variety of partner sales models – OEM, reseller, referral and co-sell – offering incentives, discounts, referral fees and deal registration that align with the unique business practices for each environment, according to the company.

The program already includes more than 400 members, from solution providers such as OEMs and VARs to service providers such as SIs, implementation, and advisory and consulting partners, and technology partners such as ISVs and cloud vendors.

Information Builders’ Pat Bernard

“We engaged several longstanding partners and a selection of newer partners who provided insight and recommendations which helped to hone development of the program,” Bernard said. “Inherent issues in this space include the inability to gain access to enablement, go-to-market resources, register sales opportunities, access software, and line of sight into the sales pipeline in a frictionless way. As an example, we implemented a partner relationship management (PRM) system that seamlessly ties into our sales force automation (SFA) system. This enables partners with dashboard visibility into real time deal registration, pipeline, training and accreditation status.”

“As our partner, Information Builders provides the most scalable business intelligence solution with the broadest reach into other data sources,” said Dan Wilson, Cloudera‘s alliance manager. “When working with a customer that requires data consumption by large numbers or type of users, we turn to Information Builders’ WebFOCUS. For those customers that require access to multiple data sources, we can offer Information Builders’ iWay. Combined with WebFOCUS data quality and master data-management solutions, we can deliver outstanding solutions to almost any customer need or use case.”