This blog post was written by Mariia Onyshchenko, the partner manager at Exalate.
Remote collaboration is now an essential part of doing business. Companies are connecting to bring to life a new project. Organizations merge to form new world-famous enterprises and also collaborate with services companies to ensure a smooth process. Departments of the same company organize to bring the best customer experience, etc. And to ensure frictionless communication between all of them, you need an integration solution.
And there are many integration solutions on the market which could help make your life easier.
Application integration is still a hot topic. With the help of Exalate, we have successfully helped various customers ranging from relatively simple to complex use cases.
Berry Kersten (Avisi)
If it is not your first time visiting the Exalate blog, then you might already know how Exalate is different.
But to be on the safe side, let me sum it up briefly:
- Exalate is built upon a distributed architecture, which allows complete autonomy for each side.
You don’t have to worry about the admin from the other side messing up your sync. Once the integration is set up, you get to decide what information will be sent, received, and how you want to display it.
That’s why Exalate is so popular among customers in the fintech and banking industry, government organizations, tech and IT, telecom, and professional services. Basically, all those companies for whom security is of utmost importance.
Exalate is also the perfect choice for cross-company integration. But almost half of our customers use Exalate to connect different platforms internally.
- With Exalate you can choose the platforms you’d like to sync.
You don’t have to purchase all of our connectors at once. You can add new integrations over time. Grow your Exalate network at the pace most suitable for you.
Exalate’s Configuration Modes
Visual Mode
The Basic mode is perfect for basic to medium complexity integration use-case. It does not require almost any technical knowledge.
Scripting Mode
The Script mode is suitable for medium to high complexity integration use-cases. It requires a learning curve if you have never worked with Groovy or any other object-oriented programming language, but once you get the hang of it, the possibilities are practically endless.
And you can start with the Exalate free version to see if works for your specific scenario.
So, why should one consider to become an Exalate Partner?
As a partner, you add one more solution to your services portfolio. So whenever an integration use case comes up, you will be able to offer various solutions to your clients and help them choose one that fits their use case best. So, first, you will have happier customers!
Second, the revenue! We provide our partners with up to 20% discount, but I should also add that normally most of our partners’ profit comes from professional services around Exalate (configuration, implementation, maintenance), and license management is a much smaller part of it.
By the way, note that Exalate is a subscription-based license.
Exalate is a networking product. So once a customer introduces Exalate to their organization with a simple use case, say a Jira Zendesk integration, they realize that they can actually connect their Salesforce, too.
Now the whole team is in sync: The support team (on Zendesk) can confirm the deal value or closing probability with the Sales (on Salesforce) and easily escalate the ticket to the Development team (on Jira) when necessary. That’s an intra-company sync.
Now, they start working with a company called ABC on a mutual project. ABC uses AzureDevOps. So they connect their Jira to ADO and start the development. And it’s already a cross-company use case. And it keeps on snowballing: you are going to have more and more Exalate customers.
The ultimate goal for both a solution vendor and a partner is to have happy customers. It makes sense, because why would one push a solution when it doesn’t fit? It will only bring more support, and more work for customer success, and will definitely hurt the partner’s credibility resulting in frustration for everyone.
It’s very important for us that customers trust Exalate partners. This way, the Exalate team is able to focus on the product development and pass the consultancy work to the partners.
What perks would I get as a partner?
The app helps me look like an absolute expert and with the easy setup, you can have an advanced setup up and running in less than an hour. For basic ones, less than 10 minutes.
Daniel Miks (Eficode)
We are keen to get you up to speed with a product. Free live and on-demand product and sales training, certifications, guides, community, and video tutorials are at your service.
We also provide you with a free partner license, which you can use both for testing and tinkering, and also for integrating with your current customers. Introduce them to the product and, who knows, maybe they ask you to link their instance with their other partner(s).
Without Exalate, we’d have a lot of administrative overhead in keeping track of everything going on.
JORDEN VAN BOGAERT (Brain2)
And, of course, here come the joint marketing opportunities.
We have noticed that those are very important, especially for the newly-joined partners, since they help “warm up” your target audience and gently introduce to a new solution in your portfolio. And, of course, generate a lead or two.
Once you feel comfortable with Exalate, you can get certified. Certification is a green light for our inside sales team: now you’re ready to receive qualified leads.
Is it necessary that we have an official agreement in place?
Yes. A partnership agreement protects both sides.
Another highly important part of the Partnership Agreement is an NDA. We share a lot of confidential information with our partners, especially during the lead handover process.
Also, having an NDA in place gives reassurance to all employees in the partner organization to share necessary information with our sales and marketing team. This helps close deals and build a strong relationship (even, I daresay, friendship).
What is expected from the partners?
We understand that:
a) integration use-cases are not coming up every day,
b) Exalate is a niche solution and will not work for any integration use case.
That’s why we always stress that our partners can onboard at their own comfortable pace. But please keep in mind that we are not able to allocate any leads to your organization unless there is at least one certified Exalate expert.
We suggest that you start the onboarding process as soon as you have joined the partner program. Understanding the product features will help you fish out all the relevant use-case and build an Exalate customer base.
I hope this article was helpful for you.
Are there any questions left? Check out our partner page.