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Alteryx looks to build on channel momentum
Partners are increasingly bringing in fresh opportunities, and the firm’s channel lead is looking to support that trend
Alteryx has seen its channel revenues rise, and its partner lead is keen to build on that momentum with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), verticals and maximising its tech alliances.
For the past four years, Rishi Kapoor, worldwide partner sales engineering leader at Alteryx, has been part of the team heading up the channel charge at the data analytics and visualisation specialist, with the past couple of years seeing the contribution from partners make an impact on the business.
He said there had always been an expectation for the channel to work with opportunities generated by the vendor, but efforts have been increased to enable partners to bring in more revenue independently. “We’ve been empowering partners,” said Kapoor. “You can actually help influence our business by bringing in exponential revenue.
“Alteryx has always been very supportive of the channel business and network,” he said. “We have a very strong network of partners and I would describe the UK&I as the largest market outside of the Americas.
Kapoor said the efforts to support partners had included increasing enablement, to connect with those signed up to programmes with its tech alliance ecosystem and to encourage the development of vertical expertise.
“In the UK, there’s a strong reliance on partners,” he said. “For a number of years now, we’ve been leveraging the strengths of the various partners in the UK. Whether it’s your GSIs for more long-term, strategic digital transformation projects for our customers, or whether it’s partners who built their whole business model on Alteryx … what I’ve been doing is enabling my team to ensure we leverage the strengths of specific partners in various ways to achieve customer success.
“It has been around making sure the relationships with our mature partners are still there and strong as our strategy and priorities are changing,” said Kapoor. “We have partners specialising in retail, supply chain, financial services and insurance.”
Channel strategy
The explosion of interest in AI has inevitably had an impact on channel strategy, and Kapoor has been making moves to ensure the firm has partners with skills in that area.
“We have been looking for new partners, especially around AI,” he said. “Partners with a focus, who have an AI strategy, as well as working with cloud data platforms such as Google, Databricks and snowflake as our tech alliances.
“We’re taking the partners along our journey, so as we’re evolving our product by embedding AI in every element of our platform, which is called Alteryx One, partners are also building out solutions within our product itself,” said Kapoor. “Partners have really been influencing our product roadmap. We’re usually very transparent with partners on that perspective.”
The shift upwards in channel revenues and the increasing demand for AI means the rest of this year will see a focus on continuing to drive that progress with partners.
“The priority is supporting their journeys on their way to implementing the AI strategy,” he said. “A priority for us this year is making sure that we’re supporting the partner businesses when it comes to what the partner wants to do.
“Potentially, we have co-sell partners, resell partners, a number of partners that want to focus on just providing their services, and others just want to resell software as well,” said Kapoor. “There’s a strong focus on what the partners want to do.”
