Riverbed Rise: Create sustainable and profitable growth while meeting the rapidly changing customer demands driven by digital transformation and the cloud.
Digital transformation, cloud economics and increasing consumer demands for technology are rapidly accelerating change in the IT industry. As Riverbed partners, your customers demand the best technology. But now, they want that tech provided through a variety of new consumption models, and they need their solutions delivered swiftly and economically. If partners aren’t agile enough to keep up, customers might move on to competing solutions.
Riverbed is ideally positioned for this new world with an expanded portfolio that’s optimized for rapid transformation. However, through partner input and industry analysis, we’ve realized that the old, competency- and compliance-based partner programs are nowhere near agile enough to keep partners successful and profitable. That’s why we’re kicking off the new year by introducing Riverbed Rise—a unique partner program that’s engineered to elevate partner success through today’s constant change.
Why Riverbed now
You may know Riverbed as the Application Performance company—but we are so much more. With an expanded portfolio that includes our leading WAN Optimization solutions, Digital Experience Management (for end-to-end visibility), SD-WAN and a “Software-defined Edge” solution (reducing risk and improving operations and agility), we are ideally positioned to help customers succeed through a rapidly changing and unpredictable IT environment.
In this new world, services are crucial, and our solutions are a great fit for a wide range of partner offerings.
Rising to the challenge
Your customers want the best technology, but they’re not going to wait. Even your long-standing customers will go for what’s immediately available if it fits enough of their requirements. That means you, as a Riverbed partner, can’t be held back by the red tape of traditional partner programs. Over the last year, you’ve spoken to us about your struggles—and we listened.
Riverbed Rise is the result of your input and requests. We’ve thrown out the old conventions to deliver a partner program with no complicated requirements, no micromanaging, lots of options and incredible opportunities.
This simplified program:
- Removes competency and compliance requirements so that you can rapidly react to industry changes and sell the latest Riverbed technology
- Knocks down old barriers so that you have easy access to the information you need to sell the entire Riverbed portfolio
- Supports traditional delivery, as-a-service delivery, and every transformational step in between, allowing you to offer customers leading-edge Riverbed solutions with the greatest amount of budget flexibility to meet their needs
Riverbed Rise—A new name for a transforming industry
You might wonder why we changed the name of this new partner program. It’s simple: we wanted to start fresh, so that there’s no doubt that this is a real change.
Riverbed Rise reflects Riverbed’s commitment to elevating Riverbed and our partner community to meet the challenges of a whole new business environment. It expresses our pledge to provide unwavering partner support before, throughout and after disruption. It elevates the value of the partner program so that partners can capitalize on the opportunity of transformation. And it sends a message and a challenge to our competitors that Riverbed, and our partners, have embraced the new ways of doing business demanded by customers.
What happens to existing Riverbed investments?
Our partners have invested time, funds and intellectual capital in our traditional, competency-based partner programs, as was to be expected. That’s how the programs have always run! You may feel that your investments haven’t fully paid off, or that this new program might invalidate your efforts.
Your existing investments are about to deliver returns in big ways.
Every investment that our partners have made will count in Riverbed Rise. Your partner level will not change as this program takes hold, and your trained resources will immediately count toward dividends.
If you have training, it’ll be reflected in your acquisition of new customers, continued account penetration, and transformation toward selling as a service. Instead of measuring compliance, we’ll be rewarding that sales progress. Partners who have invested in Riverbed have already begun to rise—and now this is your chance to elevate your Riverbed opportunity higher for even greater rewards.
Simple, Flexible, Profitable
This is our pledge to you: we will offer a partner program that’s simple, flexible and profitable. This is a cornerstone principle, and underpins our entire program design—now and into the future. And we’re putting our money where our mouth is: our success is entirely measured by how we perform versus these principles.
How do we aim to meet these objectives? You’ll find the details on our new partner center but at a high level, we’ve designed a program that:
- Does not measure compliance, but rewards performance
- Enables you to choose how you want to go to market and get rewarded
- Vastly simplifies the process of determining how you receive and use rewards
Ready to get started?
Getting started with Riverbed Rise is easy: if you’re already a partner, you’re already dialed in! When the new program starts in January, you’ll log in to experience a new, robust partner center that makes it easier to get information. There are no changes to your partner tier through July so that you can get acquainted with the new system. Then, we’ll continue to roll out features throughout the first part of the year, including a simplified discount structure, that eliminates competency requirements and provides discounts based on your program level alone.
In order to generate the most impact from Riverbed Rise, we’re asking our partners to log in, get familiar with the program, and then embrace two business acquisition strategies going forward:
- New customer acquisition—we have a whole new product set that’s important and relevant. To get customers, we need our partners to bring this technology to them.
- Deeper penetration with existing customers—For our partners who are focused on an existing customer group, we want to encourage portfolio growth, and we’re rewarding expanded, deeper penetration with existing customers in the new program.
For more information, you can refer to the Riverbed Rise partner guide. If you’re not a Riverbed partner yet, and want to get started, you can apply on the Partner Center, or send an email to [email protected].