Nick Hoskins (Cloudera)
Machine learning and analytics platform vendor Cloudera has appointed Tech Data as its first distributor across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).
The choice was a simple one, according to recently appointed country manager for A/NZ Nick Hoskins, and took into account three key points.
"Firstly, they are part of a global billion-dollar business and they are a well-known brand and very highly regarded distributor, certainly in A/NZ," Hoskins told ARN. "What is really interesting to us is that Tech Data brings a lot of tools and intelligence to the local channel community.
"Such experience is going to help us identify new routes to market with specialist companies and that could be either existing or emerging providers in the big data arena."
Under the agreement, Tech Data will have access to the vendor's solutions across data centre, cloud, analytics, security and mobility portfolios.
"We are looking at enabling partners to capitalise on the opportunities that Cloudera represents in the analytics and machine learning market," Ivan Hecimovic director, vendor management A/NZ at Tech Data told ARN.
According to Hecimovic, the partnership will also help partners maximise new revenue margin opportunities.
"We are looking to offer a clear value proposition to the market and for our partners, a single point of contact for enterprise solutions," he said. "We are looking to accelerate the engagement with Cloudera through accelerating pre-sales and services capability and also looking at leverage marketing and lead generation programs."
Trans-Tasman approach
Prior to the Tech Data partnership, Cloudera go-to-market was through resellers and in a "few cases" directly with clients.
"We've had quite a lot of focus in building up that partner community, and resellers," Hoskins told ARN. "Those transactions were traditionally directly with those partners, so we are very excited about bringing Tech Data in and establishing a three-tier distribution model."
Cloudera's partners include traditional resellers, service providers and managed service providers but the vendor has also sold through large infrastructure partners, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell EMC.
With Tech Data, Cloudera expects to reach to all the partners that are important to its customers.
"It's really exciting to us because traditionally we had to take a lot of the work on ourselves and there is huge demand for Cloudera skills in the market, technical skills in particular," Hoskins added.
"This relationship is going to help us keep up with that demand by identifying a lot of opportunities to develop those skill sets and in doing so unlocking new revenue streams to the channel."
Moreover, Cloudera believes that Tech Data will help the vendor better understand its end customers, specifically their needs and requirements with respect to how they consume big data, machine learning and analytics services and ultimately identifying a new group of partners.
