Azul channel boss working at scale

It has been a couple of weeks since Java specialist Azul announced it was gaining a majority investment from Thoma Bravo, and already the implications are being scoped into the firm’s channel chief’s planning for next year.

Simon Taylor, global vice-president of partners at Azul, has been with the vendor for three years, growing the indirect business significantly during that time, along with introducing a partner programme and overseeing investment increases in enablement.

“When I joined ... we would probably be doing, in total, everything channel – around 10 to 12% on partner-sourced revenue,” he said. “If you look at where we are right now, in our Q3, we’re probably tracking to around 50 to 51%. So, in the space of three years, we flipped our new business to be over 50% centric channel, and we’ll probably track a lot higher. That’s a global number. In Europe, this is significantly higher – it’s over 85% everything channel.”

Taylor has channel experience stretching back over the past couple of decades and he came into the role at Azul with a clear plan of action to grow the indirect business.

“I have a particular methodology that we followed. So, in the first year or so, I tend to incentivise disruption – like launching a channel programme, putting disruptive discounts out there, grabbing the attention if you’re in a mid-market and enterprise solution team area for our partners, working out which partners to work with. That worked very well for us. In the space of the first year I was here, we onboarded a good 90% of all the major VARs in the world,” he said.

“Where we’ve been for the past 18 months … is incentivising capture. We’re trying to build and scale what we have right with our partners. Some of that is just basic enablement, and it’s about focusing on particular areas of demand and incentive, and making sure that partners are bringing opportunity to us. We have a consistent run rate of business now that’s built from pipeline.”

Partners with software asset management practices have been natural choices for Azul, but with the firm’s portfolio of Core, Prime and Intelligent Cloud, there are opportunities around cloud and security. As the pipeline being generated by partners has increased, the vendor has been investing in the training to make sure partners can tap into all of the areas covered by its product portfolio.

“In this past year, we have spent over $150,000 renewing our sales training materials for the channel as well. Now they have modern avatar-based training, we can drive compliance at the sales and technical level. We’ve incentivised all the partners in our partner programme to do that,” he said.

Given the involvement of Thoma Bravo, plans include working at scale to deepen the relationships with existing partners and to identify more areas where the channel can make an impact.

“Particularly with Toma Bravo involved, we’re going to be incentivising scale, so it’s going to be much more around the run rate as a whole company to being predominantly channel centric – and with that comes not just doubling down on our platform, core Oracle takeout opportunity in the market, it’s also broadening into other areas,” he said, adding the firm’s Intelligence Cloud offering that appealed to MSPs as an example.

“We’re now working with our partners more on modernisation as a strategy, which [applies to] our platform prime products – taking legacy workloads and moving them to the cloud. This resonates very well with both integrators, VARs and alliance partners because we’re focusing on partners that want to develop high propensity opportunity aligned to customer spend categories, where they know those customers are investing and there’s a service opportunity for them and a license opportunity for us.”

Taylor said that the main lesson he has learnt in his channel career is to ensure the technology and support being offered to partners matches the way they go to market: “The most important thing is alignment. [You must] align what you’re doing to the go-to-market of the partner, and that requires a very different perspective. It requires an outside-in versus an inside-out mentality. That’s what gives you the secret sauce to accelerate.”

He said that 2026 is going to be a busy year, and the channel team at Azul is continuing to invest in growth areas for partners, with MSPs being one area identified for further development.

“We’ll try to drive additional revenue streams through things like managed services. We’ve only just touched on the surface of opportunity there,” he added. “There’s a more strategic growth areas, both modernisation with AWS, but there’s also some of the alliances that we’ve been working with recently. There’s more we can do in those areas.”