Q&A: Adam Olson Recognized as CRN Channel Chief

Each year, CRN selects its annual list of Channel Chiefs, recognizing honorees “on the basis of their professional achievements, standing in the industry, dedication to the channel partner community and strategies for driving future growth and innovation.”

We are delighted that our own Adam Olson, Vice President of Worldwide Sales, was recognized as a 2019 Channel Chief. Adam sat down with us to discuss how he supports Arcserve’s channel partners to drive value and growth.

Question: What were Arcserve’s top accomplishments in the channel over the past year?

Answer: I am proud of the work we did last year with launching the Arcserve Accelerate Partner Program, which includes industry-leading margins, rebates and support for the various partners of ours. We also launched the Arcserve Academy to help partners and customers gain technical and sales training and certification through a classroom, which we offered through online tools and videos, or on location.

In addition to creating Accelerate and Academy, I also championed expanding an already robust set of support capabilities globally and strengthened key technology partnerships with vendors including Nutanix, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and others. In turn, this expanded portfolio support for channel partners and helped build interoperability with partner ecosystems.

To accelerate results, the Arcserve marketing team also re-launched our corporate website, messaging and brand, driving more excitement and demand from partners and customers.

Q: How has Arcserve’s partner community grown over the past year?

A: It is an exciting time to be an Arcserve partner. Within the last year, Arcserve solutions and bookings beat market growth rates in all regions. Our partner base grew double-digits in terms of number of partners, but more importantly in terms of bookings and revenue. Our existing partners continue to drive more and larger opportunities, including multiple six and seven-figure wins within the mid-market. We are excited that our partners have embraced our cloud solutions and finding synergy in augmenting their already robust on-premise wins with cloud offerings to increase their share of wallet.

Q: How did you personally work to solve a problem for a channel partner?

A: One of our partners came to us with a shrinking pipeline and bookings from two of their top four vendors in our category. Those vendors were having problems with quality, pricing, leadership stability, and ability to win. We listened to their needs in terms of programs, configurations and pricing, which led the way for focused training and enablement of both their presales and sales staff. As a result, we offered a robust set of tools, trials, promotions, and offers that would make it easy for an end user to prove their use cases were solved at a fair price. Ultimately, the partner recovered lost revenue and continues to grow with our portfolio.

Q: What were the top investments Arcserve made over the past year to support channel partners?

A: Last year, we enhanced deal registration to include up to 35 percent discounts for certain partner types and tiers, while introducing incentives on our renewals business. To reward strong performance from partners and customers, we developed an aggressive and lucrative rebate program.

As part of our continued dedication to partner training and certification, we introduced incentives to become accredited through Arcserve’s educational programs and revamped our complimentary training through Arcserve University with tracks for sales, technical sales, and technical architecture.

And from a portfolio perspective, we expanded our portfolio with Arcserve Cloud and Arcserve UDP Appliance, enabling partners to better meet end-user needs, drive higher average order values and enter into a larger market.

Q: What will be the key to success for Arcserve channel partners in 2019?

A: Focus. Arcserve provides a breadth of solutions that give customers and partners multiple choices. Our solutions solve physical, virtual, on-premise, cloud, and hybrid use cases, allowing partners to remain focused on one data protection vendor instead of getting distracted by three, four, or even five vendors. Arcserve is easy to do business with and will drive value to win with our partners.