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ChannelChat: Dell Boomi Launches New Partner Portal to Support Restructured Channel Program

Dave Tavolaro, VP of Business Development, Dell Boomi

Dell Boomi, a leading provider of cloud integration and workflow automation software, announced a major evolution of the company’s channel partner program.

As part of the partner program expansion, Boomi now offers two paths to encourage proficiency in selected areas. The Partner Integration Accelerator program is structured to ensure partners gain practical experience while leveraging Boomi best practices.

The Partner Competency Recognition program supports skills development throughout the sales and delivery cycle that recognizes a partner’s commitment to sell, design and implement Boomi solutions.

A key element of the new program is the company’s new partner portal, which was built to provide training, pre-sales and sales material, marketing collateral, implementation guides and support.

The new portal was “by far, the most valuable addition to the program,” said Jason Frost, Chief Executive Officer at Anatas, an Australian company. The easy-to-use portal “immediately improves the way we engage with our customers and with Boomi, allowing us to easily post feedback, register leads, access technical information and training, and leverage marketing and sales collateral.”

CMR talked with Dave Tavolaro, Vice President of Business Development at Dell Boomi,to learn more about the portal and other key features of the new partner program.

CMR – Launching a new partner portal can be a daunting task. What prompted you take on this challenge?

Dave Tavolaro — As the specific market we’re in continues to grow, we recognized a need to grow our partner program. When we talked to all of our key partners across all segments in our business, one of the overwhelming things that came back was that Boomi provides a tremendous level of partner service. (But) they also said that getting access to the information that we provide could be easier. That was one of the main drivers of the portal.

CMR – Did you have a partner portal in place?

Dave Tavolaro – Yes, we did. But it was fairly rudimentary. It was more focused on partner activation, and the content in it was not readily accessible or regularly updated. Now, virtually all of the content that we provide to our sales team, as well as all the information that our training team and our technical team gets, is exposed in a very accessible self-service portal. We’re going to continue to update it with competitive information and a lot of use cases around how people are using Boomi and how partners are implementing Boomi with our customers. Our partners have complete access to our Learning Management System and we’re adding new courses for all of the elements of the Boomi platform.

CMR – Does the new portal also support through-partner marketing activities?

Dave Tavolaro – Yes. We’ve exposed a lot of our own marketing content. Our “marketing in a box” program gives partners all the content they need to run their own campaigns around Boomi. We also have programs to develop joint marketing activities — awareness campaigns or specific demand generation campaigns — where our partner marketing team and the partner’s team can create content to generate new business opportunities for them.

We’ve grown our partner marketing team by several people in the last six months, and we’ve got headcount to add a few more. Our partners welcome the opportunity to work with a fully-fledged marketing department that does this kind of work every day.

CMR – How well integrated is the partner marketing team with the company’s overall marketing organizations?

Dave Tavolaro – The channel is extremely essential to our overall business strategy. Over half of our business comes through the channel. So our partner marketing team is part of our marketing organization. We do a very good job of aligning and customizing our messages in the channel with the overall Boomi message.

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