Barbara SpicekI was extremely honored and pleased to receive not only the CRN 2017 Women of the Channel Award, but also the CRN Power 100 Award, a subset of the former for women who have earned a special distinction based on their exemplary record of success and level of channel influence.
Without a doubt, 2016 was a year of channel innovation and refresh at Gigamon. We made changes to our program to allow for improved profitability for partners, launched innovative programs to inspire and reward solutions selling, fired off a series of discounts and incentives to expand business into new accounts, and refreshed the entire enablement and training catalogue.
Creating Opportunity: The Power of Solution Selling
Major market transformations have been driving channel transformation for many years. The combination of increasing infrastructure and solution complexity, exploding data and infrastructure growth, and a continuing shortage of IT staff has driven a customer need for partners who can put together everything—from product choice to design and implementation capacities to trusted technology advice. Anymore, many customers do not look at the large global systems integrators, instead preferring the proximity of their close and trusted local partner to provide full solutions.
At Gigamon, we are all about creating wholly-owned solutions sales for our partners worldwide. The Gigamon Visibility Platform/GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform allows the partner to design a full architectural sale to customers. Gigamon is the “glue” that connects network performance management (NPM), application performance management (APM) and security tools with support and professional services skills so that partners can better drive a profitable and sticky business with their customers.
The Power of Alliances
Gigamon is deeply engaged with our entire ecosystem alliance framework. For our channel partners, we have developed full sets of use cases, solutions briefs and sales guides for nearly all NPM, APM, and leading security tool vendors. We also launched our Sell Smart Program last year to further incentivize our partners to sell GigaSECURE together with our security tool partners. Just a few more steps toward bringing clients a full platform solution.
The Power of Women
Channels & routes-to-market is one of the most interesting—as well as challenging—fields to work in. Creating a worldwide network of partnerships to support a company’s growth is truly exciting. I love the fact that such a large number of women hold these positions and that CRN is recognizing me and my fellow Power 100 for the innovation and drive we stand for.
I have been coaching and advising women throughout my career, whether within university programs, through my direct work environment, or amongst friends. As women, we must support each other and continue to produce the power for success.
