We all consume more information from more sources and spend more time online than ever. Did you know that the average Internet user aged 16 to 64 spends six hours and 58 minutes online per day across all devices? A report titled “DIGITAL 2022 – Global Overview” offers insights into digital trends across media, devices, and platforms. In our industry, add to this the many announcements by vendors, providers, and new buzzwords and technologies, and things can become complex – fast.

Making the complex easy and simple is  – hard. Aryaka has always strived to help our customers and channel partners with this. The Aryaka Accelerate Channel program does just that, and CRN agrees with us and gives it a 5-Star Rating.

Enabling our partners in the same way – easy and simple to understand our as-a-service SD-WAN and SASE offerings and for enterprises to consume and buy our services and spend less time doing so, we recently launched several updates. I will cover them in this blog.

Training and Certification

We refreshed our entry-level course Aryaka Certified Partner (ACP-2022). It is a streamlined, easy-to-consume course. Just like our services are easy to consume. Aryaka Partners can sign up here and take the online course at their own pace. It consists of seven modules to help partners get a solid and foundational understanding of Aryaka’s SD-WAN and SASE solutions and target markets/customers.

Next quarter, we will follow up with a new Aryaka Certified Engineer (ACE-2022) course, covering in-depth how we address enterprises’ challenges with our solutions. The ACE is for our partners’ Solution Architects and Sales Engineers.

Hear from Our Partners and find the Right Partner for You

We refreshed and gave our partner web page a significant overhaul. It is now easier than ever for prospective partners to quickly understand the benefits of the Aryaka Accelerate channel program and to hear directly from our partners like Planet One and Intelysis why they are excited about the program.

The Wire Wire Series highlights partners outlining partner success and why they win with Aryaka.

• Want to stay in touch as a partner? While on the partner webpage, scroll down and sign up for our monthly partner newsletter.
• Interested in becoming an Aryaka Partner? Check out this brief message from our Channel Chief Craig Patterson about what’s in it for you when signing up with the Aryaka Accelerate channel program. No wonder Craig has recently been named the 2022 Circle of Excellence Award Winner by Channel Futures.

We also made it simple for enterprises to look up who our partners are in each region to find their preferred partners with an easy-to-navigate page layout. Check it out after you finish reading this blog post.

Online Marketplaces

As more commerce happens online, including B2B transactions, just like our services are flexible and offer choice – we provide flexible choices of how to buy our services. We’re expanding our presence to online marketplaces as an option for enterprises that prefer this buying option. For starters, you can find us now on the AppSmart Marketplace and the Ingram Micro CloudBlue Fast-Track Program. Expect more to come in the future.

Gartner Partner Finder

If you are a Gartner client, you can find and connect with us via Gartner’s Partner Finder Tool. From their article: Gartner’s Partner Finder is an exclusive tool designed to help tech CEOs grow indirect channel business as a route to market. Search for Aryaka and find us there if you prefer this route.

Channel-led and customer-first – Making Things Easy

It all comes back to making things and life easier for networking and security IT professionals and our partners to accelerate business success and solve problems. As one of our partners says:

“Today’s global organizations can’t afford the applications they’re adopting and the business process they have in place, to not be running at peak performance…Our clients have been absolutely blown away when they realize their existing infrastructure and hardware isn’t a factor. Aryaka’s solution is easy to implement, and it can be up and running quickly. The solution sells itself.”

Let us help you accelerate your journey to an SD-WAN and SASE cloud-first architecture and benefit from our as-a-Service solutions.

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Like many of you in the channel, I’ve just spent a week in Vegas at the 25^th anniversary Channel Partners Conference & Expo. Congratulations, Channel Partners, on 25 years. Thanks for bringing the channel community together twice a year and every day online. We agree – the best is yet to come!

Here are a few of the reasons why:

1. The channel is back – bigger and better than ever. More than 7,400 people turned out for CPEXPO – the largest contingent in the event’s history. It’s confirmation of what many of us in the channel community already know – the channel is growing in numbers and importance to businesses in navigating complex tech decisions. The record attendance also included a greater mix of agents, VARs and MSPs. The channel convergence we’ve anticipated for more than a decade may finally be here!
2. Network transformation is an opportunity and a challenge. Telecom agents are looking for providers to help their customers transition from MPLS-centric wide area networks to flexible software-defined WANs. At the same time, provider consolidation is narrowing their options as legacy carriers buy up disruptive competitors. Aryaka remains independent and invites partners to join our continuing campaign for cloud-first networking.
3. Marketplaces are gaining momentum. Online marketplaces are not new; they thrive in the software world as a direct-to-customer channel for buyers that have done their digital homework. What’s happening now is that marketplaces are adding more complex services like SD-WAN (stay tuned for some big news from Aryaka). At the same time, they are embracing rather than disintermediating the traditional IT and telecom channels. Buyers get the best of both worlds – expert advisors and simplified ordering.
4. SASE soars. Secure networking is priority one with partners and their customers, and for a good reason – network security is complex. They’re looking to simplify with integrated and managed SASE and SD-WAN. Aryaka’s 6^th annual State of the WAN report backs up what we heard in conversations at CPEXPO: More than two-thirds (64%) are deploying or planning to deploy SASE over the next year. A similar number will opt for a managed SASE to help address complexity and costs.
5. Diversity moves to center stage … literally. Diversity in gender and race were evident among the speakers and topics at CPEXPO – a welcome change for an industry long criticized for the opposite. While we’ve still a long way to go as a community, the show organizers deserve credit for leading us toward greater inclusion. For those of us at Aryaka, diversity is part of our DNA as an organization. Our global team is diverse from the home office to the corner office; two-thirds of our leadership are diverse in gender and/or race.

Those are my top five takeaways. Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear from you! Connect with me personally on LinkedIn or email channelpartners@aryaka.com.

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This year, Aryaka announced the launch of the new Aryaka Accelerate Global Partner Program and our total transition from a channel-first to a channel-led go-to-market strategy.

We built the global program on the foundation the Aryaka Channel Team set in the fall of 2021 with our sales agent program launched at CPEXPO 2021, to include partnerships of all types, including:

• Managed services providers (MSPs)
• Value-added resellers (VARs)
• Cloud service providers (CSPs)
• IT distributors
• Marketplaces
• Technology services brokerages (TSBs)
• Sales Agents
• Technology vendors

Over the past eight months since I joined Aryaka as Channel Chief, Aryaka has demonstrated our commitment to the channel and our partner community through significant investments in people, processes and technology so that our solutions align with our partners’ specific business models and how they choose to go to market.

We’re putting our money where our mouths are to drive real growth for our Aryaka Accelerate partners through our managed SD-WAN, SASE and Last Mile services.

Here’s what Aryaka Accelerate Partners can expect when they partner with us:

• Enhanced Sales and Marketing Alignment – As a channel-led company, Aryaka works in lockstep with partners to align and supercharge sales and marketing activities, such as strategic account mapping, marketing resources, investment in co-marketing and co-selling, and all-new account-based sales and marketing programs to generate leads for qualified partners.
• Lucrative Incentives – Aryaka offers a range of enticing sales incentives tailored to all partner types, such as commission multipliers and increased margin opportunities
• 3-Fold Customer Success – In addition to two levels of expert support, Aryaka provides customer success managers (CSMs) devoted to retaining and growing partners’ accounts.
• Training and Certification – Aryaka has a self-paced, online training program for sales and technical competencies.
• Increased Total Addressable Market (TAM) – Aryaka’s new all-in-one SD-WAN and SASE services are based on the company’s new, industry-leading FlexCore technology that combines Layer 2 and 3 networking, enabling partners to deliver services optimized for performance or cost. This flexibility also expands the total addressable market for Aryaka’s services to include businesses of all sizes – from global enterprises to regional small and medium businesses (SMBs).
• Simplified Packaging and Pricing – Ayaka’s new SmartConnect EZ + SmartConnect Pro and Prime EZ solutions are easy to quote, sell and consume with “T-shirt” sized pricing and standard service tiers, speeding time to revenue for partners.
• New Co-managed Network Option – Aryaka’s new AppAssure application enables VAR, MSP and white-label partners with the network visibility required to co-manage their clients’ networks, increasing their value and wallet share.
• Last-Mile Services Revenue – Uniquely, Aryaka can offer its network-as-a-service solution with the last-mile connections included, offering partners an additional revenue opportunity.

Industry Accolades

These investments in our new Aryaka Accelerate Partner Program have paid off, with recognition as a CRN 5-Star Partner Program. This designation speaks to the innovations and resources the Aryaka Channel Team built into the new program, including real go-to-market strategy, planning and support. Unlike other providers, we aren’t expecting our partners to do all the work to bring in deals. We’re developing true partnerships.

Our team is actively engaging with our partners in a cooperative effort to acquire new business. We generate and share leads, identify target accounts, activate account-based campaigns and work side by side to close deals with our partners.

Aryaka’s channel investments were noted by Channel Futures as well. On behalf of the Aryaka channel team. I’m honored to accept the 2022 Circle of Excellence Award, which is presented to channel leaders who strategically invest in channels and provide enablement resources so that high-performance partners can create business value for their customers.

Race for the Keys to a Corvette!
To kick things into high gear, I’m super excited about our 2022 channel sales incentives, including a grand prize for our highest-performing partner. We’re giving away a 2023 Corvette to the Aryaka Accelerate partner who sells the highest total MRR in 2022.

Who’s in the lead? Check out our leaderboard.

Our Channel Team is Growing

We’ve reinforced our commitment to the channel with industry-leading depth and experience in the Aryaka Channel Team, including:

• Rich Farbman, Vice President of Global Strategic Partnerships
• Sarah Linford Cothran, Director of Channel Programs and Operations
• Nicole Steele, Director of Channel Marketing and Enablement
• Ryan Burke, Channel Sales Director, Great Lakes
• Derek Wood, Channel Sales Director, South Central
• Matt Thompson, Channel Sales Director, Pacific
• Mike Wall, Channel Sales Director, North Central
• Lou LaVigna, Channel Sales Director, Northeast
• Mark McGarvie, Channel Sales Director, Mid Atlantic
• J. Jensen, Channel Sales Director, Rocky Mountain
• Heather Clemen, Channel Sales Director, Midwest
• Ray Marfino, Channel Account Manager, West
• Melissa Anderson, Channel Account Manager, East

I’d like to invite you to meet the team and learn more about the Aryaka Accelerate Partner Program. We’ll be at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 11-14, at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas and we’d love to chat with you about what we’ve been up to. Visit us in Meeting Room 27 or Cabanas 119, 120 and 121. Click to set up a meeting.

Got questions? Connect with me personally on LinkedIn or channelpartners@aryaka.com.

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By now, you probably have seen that something big is about to happen on December 7. We will break through the status quo and, we believe, usher in a new era. The Cloud-First Era. Two weeks ago, I attended our company-wide town hall meeting where our Product Management and Engineering teams showed the rest of the organization what’s to come. The convergence of networking and network security-as-a-service is probably a good guess, but there’s more. Much more.

This section of the blog is a bit of personal history. Almost three decades ago, I attended another town hall meeting in the fall of 1992. This one took place at the Porsche Development Center in Weissach, Germany. I was an intern student working in the clients-project management department, where I got exposed for the first time in my career to the Toyota Production System, which informs Lean manufacturing and Lean management, which informs Agile for software development and releases. Shortly after that, the public got to see what the team had been working on.

It’s a fantastic place, combining a racetrack and all functions required to develop the iconic sports and race cars Porsche is known for. And it’s located close to the main production factory in kilometers and information exchange. In the software world, one could call this DevOps. And since Porsche pays attention not only to acceleration – something we at Aryaka know a thing or two about for application acceleration – but also deceleration and safety of the drivers of its cars (users), as one example, check out the different color-coded braking systems – as do we with the security and protection of the network, apps, and users.

It was a defining moment for Porsche and the industry. I have a link to an article at the bottom of the blog if you want to read more about it. Above all, the outcome for the driver/user is the experience that is exhilarating and delightful – from start to finish.

We think December 7 will be a defining moment and a breakthrough from the status quo of the Telco-based experience for networking and network security.

Customer Experience Is Never An Afterthought

Aryaka is known for its high Net Promoter Score and customer endorsements while providing a superior application performance. Our customers continuously point out how different, better, just more delightful the experience is using our managed services. And no wonder, with our integrated approach to technology, processes, workflows, and cloud-based services delivery, lifecycle services are also never an afterthought or extra but always part of our offering. I blogged about this topic here and here and wrote a short paper about customer experience. As a company with a customer-first mindset, I started a weekly series on our social media channels with #TrustThursday to let our customers’ voices express what they value and why they trust us with their networks, data, and application traffic. After all, applications and data are the currency of a modern, digital enterprise. It’s where and how business gets done and revenue is generated.

Enterprises are being valued, grow, and thrive if they can deliver a better experience – for their users, employees, and partners. The network and network security play a vital role in this, as do the economics of providing the services an IT organization needs to be a business enabler. And it’s not only about comparing the cost of a stand-alone product or a feature, the pre-sales advanced consulting services or post-sales technical support that can be bought extra, but the total cost of ownership (TCO) and consumption of the service as a whole. This is where Aryaka excels: providing outstanding performance, reliability, and long-term value with a lower TCO.

A Better Path Forward For Tomorrow, Today

Part of our DNA is listening to our customers, serving them with a customer-first mindset and can-do attitude, and continuously innovating. Innovate with our products, global POP-based architecture, the integration of technology, service workflows, network traffic and applications insights, management capabilities, and how to consume our services. We have done that since our founding in 2009, and you can expect more from us. Last but not least, it’s also about how our channel partners can accelerate the transformation from MPLS and carrier-dependent services of their customers with Aryaka’s help. And accelerate their growth with us. We recently introduced our new Channel Partner Program, Aryaka Accelerate (you detect a mini-theme here: it’s about speed and a great experience for everyone in the value chain). Our partners can be confident and trust that they will succeed with us, today and tomorrow.

I mentioned earlier that the upcoming breakthrough unveiling is much more than just stand-alone product news. It will touch on many aspects of a managed service delivery, building on our experience and expertise. And unlike for Telco providers, there is no need to re-invent us. Nor do we need ‘A blueprint for telecom’s critical reinvention’ – as an article from McKinsey says. Having helped to usher in and pioneer a cloud-first architecture to deliver services over a decade ago was and still is the blueprint. One on which we’ll expand.

What’s Next

You will see a series of blogs on this page from our product management, engineering, and support teams that will detail our innovations and how we make them work together to deliver an even better, delightful experience.

Until then, just as no one knew what Porsche had in store until the public unveiling, you will have to wait for our announcement on December 7 at 1.00 AM EST | 10.00 AM PST.

Or, in case you really can’t make that date, catch the presentation from our CMO Shashi Kiran and SVP of Product Management Hugo Vliegen at Gartner IOCS on December 8 at 2.15 PM EST | 11.15 AM PST. Use promo code “LSC40SP” to save $475 on registration.

There is no substitute – but to hear directly from the Aryaka team.

PS: if you are a Tesla fan. It’s going to be ludicrous.

Resources

Webpage: Aryaka Breakthrough Hub

Follow us on LinkedIn  #AryakaBreakThrough | #TrustThursday

Channel Futures article Aryaka Launches Agent Program, Nixes Channel Conflict, ‘Dumb Rules’

Whitepaper Aryaka Lifecycle Services

McKinsey article A blueprint  for telecom’s critical reinvention

Porsche article 1 Porsche Development Center Weissach

Porsche article 2 Porsche Boxster Concept Car Detroit Motors Show 1993

The post A Delightful Experience Comes Standard With Aryaka appeared first on Aryaka.

High-performance connectivity is the lifeblood of businesses amidst global competition. Aryaka was founded with a simple vision to deliver the best possible managed WAN connectivity to global enterprises.

Aryaka Booth 1567 – Discover the Difference:

Stop by the Aryaka Booth (1567) at Channel Partners to discover how the Aryaka Solution differs from all the others and the benefits of partnering with a leader in the Managed SD-WAN and connectivity space.

Aryaka offers the industry-leading SD-WAN solution for enterprises, enabling any application, any-where in the world. Aryaka’s SD-WAN-as-a-Service alters how enterprises connect sites and users worldwide to business-critical applications to support their digital transformation initiatives. This combines a software-defined, global private network, WAN optimization, application acceleration, multi-cloud connectivity, and visibility in a single solution that is delivered as a service. Unlike MPLS that takes months to deploy, Aryaka’s SD-WAN can be deployed in hours and delivers on an end-to-end SLA of 99.99% uptime.

Help your Customers Accelerate their WAN Transformation

Aryaka is experiencing tremendous growth and our partners continue to be a critical part of our success.  Our global SD-WAN offering enables partners to grow their business and strengthen their customer relationships by offering a solution that accelerates their WAN Transformation initiatives.  Below are just some of the key benefits of being an Aryaka partner that we would love to tell you more about at Channel Partners:

• International Reach: Worry free deployments across the Globe
• Proven Solution: 8000+ installed global sites with best in class Customer Sat scores
• Consumption Model: Buy your Cloud connectivity the same way you buy Cloud

Want to learn more about Aryaka? Attend the SD-WAN Panel Thunderdome session!

Olen Scott, Senior Vice President Global Channel Sales at Aryaka will be answering the tough questions on the panel at SD-WAN Thunderdome session.

• When: Day 2: Thursday, April 11th 2:00pm – 2:50pm
• Room: South Convention Center, Level 3, South Seas D

Book a Meeting:

We encourage you to book a meeting with our Channel Team in our private suite at the Four Seasons to learn how you can partner with Aryaka and join us as we continue to innovate at a disruptive pace, with a goal to make “Anywhere is Possible” a reality for our global enterprise customers, blurring boundaries between continents, across branches, data centers and clouds to deliver the best possible application and user experience.

We look forward to seeing you all this week in Las Vegas at Channel Partners!

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