'7 Minutes' with Nyansa Channel Chief Peter Dehr

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Nyansa was named a  2017 “cool vendor” in mobile and wireless analytics by Gartner, and counts American Eagle, the Atlanta Braves and Uber among its diverse customer base. Its flagship Voyance offering is vendor-agnostic network-analytics software delivered in a SaaS or private-cloud model.

Gartner estimates the size of the overall network performance monitoring and diagnostics market at $2.1 billion, growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 16 percent. Nyansa focuses on the user-experience niche, saying that its product can provide insight into whether a particular user, site or location is having problems with the network and see whether others with similar infrastructures are in the same boat. Partners benefit from automatically establishing benchmarks for good performance, and then spotting deviations so you can address them before customers call and complain. The software will suggest root causes and remediation steps.

For a deeper dive into the business benefits of Nyansa’s tech, check out this blog by industry analyst Zeus Kerravala.

Nyansa’s Peter Dehr

Nyansa’s Peter Dehr is the latest channel chief to weigh in on our 7 Minutes series.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Peter Dehr: Channel partners are always interested in adding real value to the products and services they sell and the professional advice they provide. As an analytics platform that is vendor-agnostic, Voyance by Nyansa complements – across the entire network stack – the existing portfolio of network products that resellers recommend. Moreover, it gives solution providers a cloud-based solution that delivers recurring revenues as well as deep insights into how customer-access networks are behaving across the entire network.

Today, there is no such solution that resellers can use and deploy within customer environments that quantifies the end-user network experience across every aspect of the network, from connection to accessing applications in the cloud and everything in between. Voyance analyzes every client network transaction and consumes data from existing network services, servers, applications and client devices already in use with zero impact to existing network architectures.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? Do you work with masters and/or distributors?

PD: Nyansa’s Voyers channel program is purposely flat. All channel partners are created equal with the same services, benefits and incentives. The more partners engage with Nyansa and the greater the production, the greater the benefits.

Nyansa recruits partners that have a working knowledge of all aspects of the access network — not just one portion. We also look for partners with strong technical depth who can understand and communicate new technology innovations that enterprises may not grasp. Along with all the other standard features within a partner program, such as deal registration, strong margins and technical support, Nyansa uniquely offers partners direct access to internal resources, such as a call center to help drive pipeline for them.

Nyansa’s product does not lend itself to the distribution channel, which is typically better suited for commodity type products.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

PD: Over 90 percent of our sales are realized through value-added resellers. They are the heart and soul of our business because they are in the trenches and have the best relationships with customers. The margins are among the best in the industry – double digit – and come with the ability to establish an annuity-based business, that, by definition, strengthens their relationships with their customers.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

PD: Nyansa’s Voyance platform competes with a number of point product solutions that only focus on …

… a single portion of the network. Solutions from companies such as LiveAction, 7Signal, Extrahop, Cisco and Aruba can all provide some level of visibility into the user experience but not the complete picture.

None of these solutions can analyze, measure and correlate every client network transaction, despite whatever network-infrastructure products are in place, across the entire network stack. Voyance is the industry’s only vendor-agnostic network analytics platform available today. It’s also the only solution available as SaaS or a private cloud (on premises) solution. We currently manage more than 10 million client devices and over 300,000 wireless access points across hundreds of commercial deployments. The solution is installed in under one hour, requiring no client software, server agent or intrusive hardware.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

PD: We are continually expanding the number and type of data sources that we ingest into our platform. This means more and more value to our customers and channel partners. For instance, as enterprise IoT devices find their way onto corporate networks, enterprises must be able to identify them, secure them and quantify their performance on the network. Today, Voyance supports the richest set of data sources on the market, from clients to Wi-Fi access points, IP network services to applications, authentication servers to wide-area-network router flows. This allows us to uniquely deliver an end-to-end solution that allows customers to manage the entire user network performance experience.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

PD: As we expand our channel footprint, we see our strategy expanding over time to include professional services, custom programs for partners and a variety of new products that will complement their existing business.