A little over a year ago, I had the pleasure to begin an exciting journey to design the user experience for a new program to help partners grow and accelerate their cloud practice, called Cloud Practice Builder. Taking an agile and UX design approach to develop this program, it was my first attempt at developing a program keeping customer experience and pain points top of mind. In our initial phases, we produced an “minimally viable product” of our program that included a brief business-focused assessment to help our partners take the pulse of their cloud capabilities, and provided vendor agnostic roadmaps to help them understand how to advance their practice based on their score. But, oh, how it has evolved in exciting ways with partner input.

Once we launched our program, we quickly realized a lot of partners understood the direction they wanted to carry out their cloud strategy but found themselves getting bottlenecked in the process of expanding their portfolio with new vendors and offering those solutions indirectly through a dependable distributor. Here, we found an opportunity to use the framework we developed and apply it to the vendor onboarding and acceleration process.

Flash forward a few months, and through the hard work and support of several colleagues across our team and the support of our vendor community, we were able to apply this framework to help partners demystify the pathway to partnership with Tech Data and top vendors, such as Microsoft, AWS, and Google (to name a few).

In fact, we just launched three newest vendor enablement programs under the Cloud Practice Builder umbrella. Partners can now grow their practices with Microsoft Dynamics 365 (just one of a broad suite of Microsoft programs), they can also launch an IBM Cloud practice and deliver cloud data management with Veeam-powered services. They can also learn how to deploy our pre-configured Click To Run Solutions that seam together business-outcome focused solutions powered by our ecosystem of ISVs. Partners can still get started through our easy 5-minute assessment for access to this treasure trove of direction, tools and support. You can learn more about the latest advancements in our program by registering for our upcoming office hours here.

When it comes to enablement, we’ve learned that when we listen carefully to our partners’ pain points and challenges, the outcome is all the better. We get feedback, we iterate, we test it, we improve. As a result, we have developed a robust enablement suite from cloud agnostic to vendor specific supports. We are pleased to share we’ve had over 1,500 partners participate in its first year and they are coming back to reengage and discover new ways they can achieve greater cloud ROI.

Listening to our partners often opens doors we didn’t know were there – and new doors are opening all the time. Our latest venture is Tech Data’s Coaching community. Our partners – from the business owner, to the marketer, to the sales director - all have jobs to do and can benefit from the knowledge and expertise of professionals in our ecosystem. We are creating an online community that will enable partners to tap into our ecosystem of experts, not only within Tech Data, but our supplier partners as well. It’s our way of helping them easily connect with the expertise they are looking for when they need it most. This offering isn’t available just yet, but is coming early 2020. Interested partners can sign up to be the first to join our community for free here.

One thing I’ve learned throughout this experience is that our broader Tech Data Cloud Solutions team is tremendously passionate about our customers, and we take pride in solving their problems. We work hand in hand with our vendor partners to creatively turn pains into gains. We’ve seen this passion evolve into our Practice Builder program as it is today, and its laying the groundwork for our coach community. I’m excited to see where our passion – and our partners’ partnership - takes us next.

Want to learn more about Cloud Practice Builder?

In the New Year, we are hosting an office hours session to help you get up to speed on the supports we have available to you. Click here for registration and details. (An on-demand webinar will be available after this event has occurred).