velocityToday is an exciting day for us as we proudly begin a new chapter in the Viavi Solutions history book. Today we launch Velocity, a new global partner program aimed at rewarding partners who invest in their relationship with Viavi.

It’s that simple.

As some may recall, this time last year we laid the groundwork for Velocity with foundational elements of a basic partner program along with the promise of an improved, more competitive engagement model to come. Following the unveiling of our company’s new brand in August, Viavi, which will focus now not only on network test instruments but also on cloud networking and the industry’s move from hardware- to software-based networks, we’re pleased today to deliver on that promise made last year. We’ve put a lot of work into retooling the program to the benefit of our partners’ evolving business models and a shifting industry landscape, and we think our partners will be very happy with the enhancements.

There are several truisms we factored in when building this new framework. We know our partners value vendors who have vision, who have market impact, are leaders in their space and are easy to do business with. Viavi values partners who can provide coverage and reach into territories, new customers and segments, and partners that bring innovation and creativity.

From these two sets of values we arrived at the guiding principles of Scale, Relevance and Collaboration, to craft our new partner program that we believe will more aggressively motivate our ecosystem as well as equip our partners to grow their business more substantially. In this new reality of cloud networks, virtual infrastructure and software replacing legacy hardware across service providers and enterprises, a new approach is needed.

Velocity’s new aspects comprise:

  1. Tiered architecture for Authorized, Premier and Elite partners. As partners invest more for mutual success, they can improve their tier and earn access to higher benefits.
  2. Financial rewards and incentives – Tiered pricing accompanies partner tiers. Additionally, partners are rewarded for expanding their reach and capabilities through new deal registration and stocking discounts.
  3. Increased Investment in Marketing – offering an aggressive MDF program, assigned marketing support for our Elite partners and demand generation programs
  4. Sales Enablement – implementing a new Partner Portal to provide a better and easier experience for our partners to retrieve product, sales, marketing and pricing information

As more and more of Viavi’s service provider and enterprise customers find themselves at an inflection point, looking to migrate significant portions of their legacy networks to more flexible, agile and cost-effective software-based virtual networks, we feel that fostering a robust partner ecosystem is essential in ensuring customers have a trusted partner to see through these vast changes.

The enhancements in the program are truly transformational and they showcase Viavi’s commitment to executing our strategy and mission in improving channel relationships.

But this isn’t the end of the line. In the future, expect more announcements around bringing our partners additional improvements in infrastructure, channel enablement, incentive programs and training/certification. We’re looking forward to sharing with our partners and industry as a whole further updates we’ll be making to the program.

I’d love to read and respond to your thoughts and questions in the comments below, so please share what’s on your mind.

Learn more about the Velocity partner program.

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