OpsRamp Ramps Up Partner Program Under New Channel Chief

‘We’re 100 percent committed to the channel,’ Paul Brodie, OpsRamp’s vice president of global channel sales, tells CRN. ‘We’re not going to take business direct.’

OpsRamp, a San Jose, Calif.-based digital operations management software provider, has a new channel chief and is investing in an improved channel partner program to grow its business in the enterprise market.

Paul Brodie has been OpsRamp’s vice president of global channel sales for about three months, Brodie told CRN. He reports directly to Sheen Khory, OpsRamp’s chief revenue officer.

“We‘re 100 percent committed to the channel,” Brodie said. “We’re not going to take business direct.”

[Related: HPE Joins OpsRamp’s $37.5 Million Funding Round]

GreenLight Group, a consulting and systems integration services firm based in West Jordan, Utah, is one of OpsRamp’s channel partners.

Joe Madden, GreenLight’s founder and president, told CRN that OpsRamp’s products and services helped elevate GreenLight’s enterprise event and operations management solution set. The two companies are now executing a shared go-to-market strategy.

“We partnered with OpsRamp because of our commitment to our customers to continually innovate and find better solutions that enable greater visibility, deeper insight and—most importantly—the ability to adopt and monitor new technologies quickly so they can be more competitive,” Madden said. “OpsRamp’s ongoing innovation helps us deliver the level of service and innovation that our enterprise customers require.”

Part of the updates to OpsRamp’s channel partner program include a profit-sharing model Brodie described as more partner-friendly, increased lead sharing, more comprehensive sales assistance, sales and technical training, co-marketing and an expansion of the channel team with dedicated regional channel account executives and solution engineers to help with technical sales support.

Partner-involved sales deals have increased by 50 percent since late 2020, Brodie said, declining to give specific numbers. Brodie also declined to provide specific numbers around margins, only saying the margin as an OpsRamp partner is “more than the traditional margins that are available in a resale model.”

“We want to work with our partners to make sure that they’re bringing things to the table as well, as far as their ecosystem of customers is concerned,” Brodie said. “It’s not just about us leveraging them, it’s about them leveraging us and bringing new technology to the market.”

Brodie’s pitch to potential new channel partners is to join a company that is taking on IT operations management, which he pegs as a $40 billion market. Without naming OpsRamp’s direct competitors, he said, “There are a lot of legacy players that are out there that are all quote unquote ‘ripe for disruption,’ and that’s what we’re about.”

Research firms Gartner and IDC name ServiceNow and Splunk as major players in the IT operations management space.

Brodie comes to the job with about 15 years of channel leadership experience. He previously handled a partner program revamp while with Virtana, formerly known as Virtual Instruments. He also previously worked at Brocade, leaving in 2017 with the title of vice president of global systems integration and outsourcing partners.

An updated channel partner program is meant to help OpsRamp scale in enterprise sales, Brodie said. The company will continue to invest in the service provider platform market it also serves.

Recent wins to help OpsRamp grow include a $37.5 million funding round in January 2020 that included Hewlett Packard Enterprise as an investor and a comprehensive alliance with Google intended to ramp adoption of the cloud management platform among enterprises using the industry’s third-largest public cloud.

As part of the Google deal, OpsRamp will host its AI-powered cloud management, monitoring and discovery platform on Google Cloud, and will sell that Software as a Service through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

“We’re a company that’s growing very fast but we see the channel as a key contributor to that growth,” Brodie said. “We also see them as a key contributor as far as services are concerned.”