Enhancing Partnerships with Alan Butler at OpenText World 2024

This is Techron tv. Hello everybody. We're back at OpenText World in Las Vegas, and we're talking to Alan here about partnerships, alliances, and how it's all coming together.

Alan, welcome to the show. Pleased To meet you. Um, it's a, uh, it's been exhilarating here this week at OpenText World.

We're, uh, really pleased in what we're doing. Uh, we're a partner ecosystem, um, bringing OpenText to the next level for scale and for opportunities and, uh, really leaning into our ecosystem all in properly. Is there a method to the madness for who becomes an alliance partner and how does that work?

And where does OpenText kind of begin and where does it leave off and how do you guys sort that? Well, I'm responsible for the, uh, our distribution and reseller business, uh, for the company and, um, recently joined in the springtime. And we're, we're bringing industry best practices to the company for what does it mean to partner with OpenText?

What does it mean to transact with OpenText and what does it mean to build a meaningful grown ecosystem of results that, uh, we can be trusted on and dependent on, OpenText is got a broad portfolio of stuff that's been acquired. And how is all that getting pulled together for the partners in a way that makes it consumable for them? Yeah, that's our biggest, um, opportunity is to, uh, drive forward on that.

It's what I call our, uh, our management team. Um, what are we doing about enablement and partner enablement? And we have to simplify it down and we have to simplify down our broad portfolio of what I call our yellow pages of products.

We've got so much in so many areas that we're a, uh, we're a big hidden secret actually. Right? And so we're paying very strong attention to our seven divisions, our top selling products within each drive, and focus with our awareness and enablement, both technical and business and sales with our partner ecosystem in a way that, um, simplifies down where to focus on where's the biggest areas of growth, and if we're successful there, then maybe those partners should be also, How do you manage that network?

'cause you know, I've talked to a lot of companies in this space and it's either there's too many partners or there's too few partners. How do you kinda strike the right balance? Yeah, great.

Um, insight on that one. Um, OpenText, uh, acquired Micro Focus, uh, less than two years ago. And, you know, the company culture of OpenText was heavily a direct oriented company from a sales point of view, and microfocus was a very, uh, channel friendly and had too many partners of different kinds, right?

So we went on a campaign, um, in over a period of time now to successfully reduce the volume of distributors we have globally with the idea of pushing more business through fewer distributors. So we're not peanut butter spreading Mm-Hmm. Or bets.

We're actually trying to drive more business and grow the business, frankly, through the distributors, into both the resellers we have, as well as the resellers we want to have that we don't actually have and get more people in the boat rowing with us. Yeah. Um, a lot of these products and solutions require a certain amount of expertise to deploy.

So how do you get that into the channel because the partners have to be trained and uplifted. Yeah. Um, you, you're touching on yet another item of, uh, great interest to this week at OpenText World.

We, um, launched and promoted what we're doing around training and certification as a company, um, and for the partners that want it and need it, where we've been providing technical training and awareness and certification here at OpenText World. But frankly, some of our partners are with us 20 plus years, right? And some of them could teach us how to do it right and are really good about what they do.

So the opportunity is not just in helping them sell what they're already selling, but it's really about the cross pollination of product A with product B equals a new offering and in a new value, and making sure that they're aware of what that is, how deep we can go with them, and how we can help 'em become validated and certified and trained. And that is a very important feature going forward. Is there something you look for in a partner?

Are there characteristics and some of them are intangible that makes somebody a better partner than somebody else? You know, I don't know if there's such a thing as a bad partner in the context, as long as we're doing the right things for the right reasons in the right way, and, and we're ethical and, and driving the business in a, in a way that represents our brand that we want to be represented in. Um, there's different kinds of partners, of course, and, you know, some people might think partners are there just to do fulfillment Mm-Hmm.

And, um, fulfillment has its place and there's, there's value to it. But many of our partners that we tend to often call resellers are actually solution sellers and service providers and regional and boutique system integrators that are maybe not all a tier one global system integrator, but they're doing everything as valuable as them and sometimes even more. And, um, it's important that we don't do the peanut butter spread on how we categorize our partners.

We need to meet them in the ways that they, who they are from their identity, their brand. We actually need to leverage their access into their customers, of which they're there many years, sometimes long before us. Mm-Hmm.

Every partner I ever talked to is, you know, concerned job number one about profitabilities in this space. And you carry a, this broad category of everything from SMB stuff, from the security space, all the way up to a full boat information management platform. What is the profitability curve for partners look like across that and, and can they be assured that they're gonna get an ROI?

Well, it's really interesting. Um, I can't speak to the partners profitability, but what I can speak to is we, uh, recently including this week, uh, earlier in the year, we launched a partner advisory board sessions. We've done one in Dallas, we've done one in Hamburg, in for Europe.

And, um, what was a real pleasant, uh, thing for me to discover, um, is that we have partners that have hung in there with open text on micro focus for decades. They wouldn't be doing it if they weren't making money. They wouldn't be doing it if the quality of the product wasn't there.

Right. In some ways, we kind of gotta get out of our own way to help them do more and, uh, they know how to sell. They've been doing it right.

And so the profitability is there while we have to manage, is to make sure that we're doing the right things in a transparent way for the partners, for both the distributors and the resellers. We're leaning into the traditional things of what we do around deal registration and things of that nature. Because process is important and communication and transparency is important.

And frankly, we need to continue to earn our trust every day and every year. Right. And, uh, I personally don't take that for granted, and I know we have to continue to earn it.

Every partner is also concerned that the vendor that they partner with is growing the market and spending enough money on marketing to drive business to them. And I know they're supposed to drive some of them business, but they want some help from the vendor as well. What are you guys doing to help the partners market all these things?

Yeah, so, you know, uh, we're, we're kicking off a campaign here, um, coming up here pretty quick where, you know, we have our corporate accounts, our inside sales team, we have, uh, significant opportunities to, uh, and we're already looking at this to, um, take the pipeline that we have that is unassigned with partners today and actually be able to proactively feed that into the partner ecosystem. And we're gonna focus, of course, on our platinum and gold partners first, given the focus and what they're doing already with us. But you know, where our tension is to also help elevate the lower tier partners to help them gain access and to grow into our ecosystem as much as we grow with them.

So we're, you know, um, we've got this campaign going on that's, uh, gonna be coming out here fairly quickly to be able to launch net new lead generation from OpenText to our partner ecosystem and create a two-way street. So for as much as they do with us on deal registration, we're gonna be feeding back leads to them where possible in the markets. I like to tell people it's, uh, think global, but act locally.

If you can't do it locally, the rest doesn't matter. Mm-Hmm. OpenText has a sales force.

I met a few of them here in the last couple of days. How is compensation structured so that those folks are encouraged to work with partners? 'cause in a lot of cases, compensation drives behavior and sometimes the behavior gets a little conflicted.

Yeah, it, it's an evolving picture in all honesty. And, you know, uh, you know, OpenText is a large company, right? You know, we're, you know, 20, 25,000 person, $6 billion company that, um, is, has come together through many acquisitions over many years.

And of course, the biggest being the Microfocus acquisition, which doubled the company. Fundamentally, the, the compensation model at OpenText is actually continuing to evolve. And as a matter of fact, our enterprise sellers and our cyber teams are coming together really quick.

The, the alignment with common partners who are selling a DM or IOM and we want everyone to pay attention to security is really important. Uh, those cross pollination is important as initiatives and, and incentives in place now to help neutralize that, uh, compensation model to ensure that that goes on. And then, and at the same time, you know, a big part of my job on a daily basis is internal selling.

Making sure the company and the organization at all levels understands what we're trying to do with the partner ecosystem, what we're trying to do with our distributors and resellers and, and our regional and and boutique system integrators so that, uh, we can actually drive a meaningful business that they see and believe is incremental and it's actually helping them sell the business. Right. All one family.

As part of that, do the partners now get rewarded more for the more products they sell? Or is there, are there programs built around specific sets and stacks of software that they wanna combine? Yeah, We got various incentives that we have in place today, but, um, you know, I mentioned security, you know, cyber and whole security is a very strong push as you know, it is needed in the industry.

It's needed in the global world we speak of today. And, and so you have to be always thinking security no matter what. As, as at the end of the day, we are driving, uh, and creating new, um, like I mentioned the deal registration program that we're gonna be very focused on what is, what does that mean for a company to cost?

Go do the deal registration, get the approval by the sales force for that deal and for that opportunity and make sure we're actually growing a business that actually feeds itself and creates a snowball effect, right? So that we actually have a two-way street that's healthy. You have a lot of alliances.

SAP is one of them, and all the alliance partners will have their own channels. Um, and then you have your channel. There are instances where those channels need to come together and converge on some sort of solution.

How does that process work and how do you kind of cross those boundaries? Now, I hate to say that's an evolving picture, but it is, right? It's a quickly evolving picture.

I'm a big believer in pilots, right? We pilot everything. We're not gonna just launch a program and hope it works.

Mm-Hmm. So, um, so, uh, we're looking at some very deliberate pilots such as had two meetings this morning specifically about this. A number of our partners in Europe, for instance, they've got very strong SAP engagement already and are working with us on a DM and an IOM and, and various parts of our, um, uh, software stack.

And this is where, what I would call the tri-party relationships come into play, right? What are we doing with SAP with these common partners that are already working with us, se separately and now how do we pull it together? And that's actually a series of very active conversations this week.

So there's a strong, strong interest. And the beauty about it is we're a, you know, top partner for SAP mm-hmm. So, um, it's for us to lose as opposed to just to win, but we can't take that for granted.

Mm-Hmm. There's also a class of partners out there called Managed Service Providers. Um, they have some unique requirements.

Is more and more of the software provided by new folks lending itself to a managed service kind of motion? Sure. Is the, uh, managed service, uh, initiative, which I have driven from my team as well, is something we're, uh, daily on, um, uh, it's feels like back to the future in some sense from my past, um, to where we're, we're.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to use the engagement models that we know works in the industry, in the industry for a long time. So we're bringing some of that back to the table here at OpenText. We're very deliberate about it.

The whole mid-market segment is a very, uh, ripe opportunity for us together. It's a lot of clean, open, uh, swim lanes. We don't have enough despite how large a company we are.

We don't have enough of our own sellers. We need a partner ecosystem, and we're gonna be very deliberate in going after the whole mid-market campaign with the MSP model is in addition to the traditional sales motions we already have. What's your crystal ball telling you about the economy in 2025?

The partners are all trying to read the same tea leaves, as it were, and, um, you know, are there segments that you think are going to do better than others? Are there product lines that are gonna be more rocking and rolling than others? You know, um, you know, you hear a lot maybe this week about AI and what AI is doing, and I've been involved in it for about five years myself and prior, prior to coming to OpenText.

Um, the, uh, AI has got a real place. Um, there's a lot of work going on in the development side of the world with this right now. Um, I think that is gonna be, uh, disruptive in a good context, just like the introduction of the browser was back in the nineties, right?

Uh, with my days with Sun Microsystems. And I feel that, uh, that's going to, uh, be disruptive in a positive sense like everything else, you know, um, that will continue to change. But there is in, in turmoil markets and the world economy we're in today, I think that's shifting so much.

The portfolio of OpenText is so broad that there's, there's very, I can't think of a place where we don't have a seat. In all honesty. Product a e slow down when product B will pick up, right?

And that's where it's really important for us to make sure that our partners and our ecosystem know what we have and where we're going so we can do it together. Are there geographies that you're looking at maybe where there's an, an, a chronic need for more partners immediately? Because there's growth in that marketplace, and I know OpenText is a global company, but there are sectors that maybe need more attention, You know, um, um, yes.

We always have a need for more partners. Um, but what we wanna do is we wanna make sure we have the right partners, not just any partner. Mm-Hmm.

So this is about quality, not quantity, right? Um, I'd rather have a thousand partners or a Golden with us together, and that's a two-way street, then have 5,000 or 55,000 partners to where we just tip the iceberg, right? So I think we need to lean in on a quality model of partnering and, and make sure that we know how to get the, uh, get them activated to get 'em into the field with us.

We need more partners in the United States. Mm-Hmm. Uh, our European business is doing great.

We need more resellers in the United States. We're activating them and we're doing them through our distributors, both in public sector as well as in, um, commercial if you will. Um, you know, our, our top distributors we have with Arrow and Climb in the United States and commercial and with, uh, IMEX Group, which is part of Arrow for Public Sector and Caresoft, um, who is an excellent partner as well in public sector.

And we're leaning into them and we've been doing a series of partner enablement, a partner activation every week and every month right now, frankly, we're just going as quick as we can. When I talk to a lot of partners, it may maybe not come as a surprise to you, but one of the things that comes through all the time is I would like to partner with that company, but it's too difficult for me to figure out how to get engaged. So for the people who want to just start with you guys, what is the point of entry and the best smoothest, easiest way to get into the ecosystem?

Yeah. Two, two things. Um, when I joined the company, I reorganized or my part of the business to are the partner account managers.

Their job is to be the partner expert, not to product expert. We got enough product experts at OpenText MM-Hmm. We don't need one more.

In that context, we need to be focused on our core business from a roles and responsibility point of view, and that make sure that we represent and, and understand how the partner ecosystem and the distributor and the reseller business, for instance, works in the real world as opposed to how we think it works. So we've made those pivots already in the summertime. Um, that's going really well actually, and we're building off of it.

com and contact us directly through that. But we've got a very serious, uh, campaign going on to where we're gonna be activating and onboarding many more partners for us through the distributors. 'cause we're leaning in on distribution in the right way.

And, um, you know, we're going to take lessons learned for what Microfocus did and didn't do. We're gonna take lessons learned from what OpenText did and didn't do, and we're gonna use industry best practices and what puts scalable model in place. All right.

And I'm assuming you're on LinkedIn, right? I am. I'm on LinkedIn a long time.

So LinkedIn used to run on some microsystems in the beginning before Microsoft bought it. So there you go. Well folks, so if you wanna partner with these folks, just look 'em up on LinkedIn, ping them and that's an easiest thing to do.

There you go. There you go. Hang on.

Thanks for being on the show. Pleasure. Thank you very much.

Thank you for all watching this episode. We'll be back in a minute.