Co-hosted with ChannelE2E’s Content Czar Joe Panettieri, CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux chatted with John Gray, senior vice president of Alliances on cloud-scale monitoring opportunities for MSPs and the partner angles.
Datadog specializes in cloud-scale monitoring. What exactly does that mean?
We’re born in the cloud. We run the service versus on prem. So, it’s one platform versus the MSP installing, running, managing, supporting, upgrading – rinse and repeat. We’re one platform that is highly scalable with one set of data. Most importantly, it’s one single agent – not multiple agents. On top of that, you layer 230 integrations that are feeding out-of-the box dashboards. And, therefore, that data is no longer siloed, which saves money in the process.
How can partners assist customers with digital transformation?
What we enable customers to do is to not only make the migration to a public-cloud platform, but we help them to be more dynamic in creating net new applications for their businesses to digitally transform and therefore accelerate the number of apps and workloads they can build by monitoring that real-time and giving them that visualization up and down the stack.
What types of use cases are you seeing for your partners and their customers?
Companies, no matter what industry, are now becoming, if you like, software companies. For example, you’re no longer dealing with a hotel or a travel agent to make a reservation, instead you’re dealing with companies that are taking to the Web and offering up people’s houses and enabling them to digitally transform that industry. You have this happening across all of these different industries and we’re enabling customers and our partners to interrogate that data with real-time access and custom metrics.
Just recently, we put in place a relationship with a major ecommerce provider. They started using us to monitor the ecommerce platform to enable their customers to satisfy themselves. The partner and customer has over 200,000 store keepers. For them, it’s important to prove to their customers that the ecommerce platform is up and running. Take that story one step further and let’s talk about what’s important for those ecommerce customers. Is it important to know how many people came through the front door and are on their website? Is it important to know how long they are staying on their website? Is it important to know what’s stuck in the shopping carts? Is it important to know how well that promotion went? These are custom metrics that we build out as dashboards that they can package with their ecommerce platform and, in turn, makes them sticky with their storekeepers. They’re adding value to their storekeepers because they’re allowing them to make better business decisions based on the data.
Did you have a formal partners program in place, or has it evolved since you arrived at Datadog?
The partner model that was in place at the time that I joined was really right for the company at the time. We have built that model out to include the enterprise very successfully over the last 12 to 18 months. The idea was in order for us to serve our enterprise customers the best we can, we really have to have a mature partner program and model. If you take a slice through the middle of enterprises, they’re dealing with their size, digital agents, resellers and public cloud platform partners. If we’re going to serve our enterprises best – we need to be partnered up with the same ecosystem of partners that they’re working with. That’s incredibly important.
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