Intermedia Introduces Four Big Enhancements to its Industry Leading Partner Program

2014-08-05

Mountain View, Calif. - August 5, 2014

Intermedia, the world’s largest one-stop shop for cloud IT services and business applications for SMBs and the partners that serve them, announces four significant enhancements to its already industry leading partner program. These enhancements include:

Intermedia also announces plans to develop a new referral model for partnerships and a lead exchange program to drive more business to qualified partners. Specific details about all these enhancements and programs can be found on Intermedia’s blog.

To mark these enhancements, Intermedia is releasing its new “partner pledge video,” in which nearly two dozen Intermedia team members—from the C-suite to the support staff—describe the company’s sincere commitment to the channel. The video can be viewed at Intermedia.net/PartnerPledge.

“Intermedia’s Partner Program stands apart because they layer a human touch on top of cutting-edge technology,” says Mike Heil, CEO of St. Louis-based Throttlenet, an Intermedia partner since 2011. “Their reputation, reliability and scale place them on the high end of the market—yet they’re always approachable, always excited to hear from us, and always willing to work with us one-on-one."

Addressing CompTIA’s top industry-wide channel pain points

In its latest State of the Channel Study, CompTIA identified the top factors that partners found dissatisfying in any provider’s partner program. These include channel conflict, cost of membership and four other pain points.

Intermedia’s partner program already stands apart from Microsoft, Google, Box, 8x8 and other cloud providers across all of these factors. There are no fees or revenue commitments; Intermedia offers a broad suite of best-of-breed services that are tightly integrated into a powerful and easy-to-use cloud management platform; it gives partners expert 24/7 technical support with hold times under a minute; and the economics of its reseller models enable partners to make greater margins. (Intermedia’s 5,000 active partners—which include MSPs, VARs, telcos and major distributors—are responsible for the vast majority of new sales.)

With these new enhancements, as the table below shows, Intermedia’s partner offering is even stronger across all six of the channel pain points identified by CompTIA.

CompTIA pain point

Intermedia’s solution
Channel conflict
77% of channel firms reported at least one lost deal due to channel conflict. 41% lost 5 deals or more.
  • Intermedia instituted a company-wide “no-compete” pledge backed by more stringent policies
  • Building a deal registration system
Cost of membership
  • Intermedia has no minimums, fees or commitments
Low margins
  • Advisor commissions increased for the 2nd time since March
  • Intermedia now enables Advisors to achieve 33% margins across the first year for data and voice services
  • Private label partners have full flexibility to bundle their services with Intermedia’s. By bundling in their own support, onboarding and administrative services, partners typically reach margins of 40-60% or higher.
Insufficient pre- and post-sales support
  • Industry leading sales assistance
  • Free white-glove onboarding assistance and proprietary tools from our Cloud Concierge™ team (partners can still bill for these services)
  • 24/7 technical support with hold times of less than 60 seconds
  • Expanded Not-for-Resale program
  • Creating a lead exchange program
Lack of marketing support
  • Premium marketing tools, resources and sales kits to help partners drive demand—all easily accessible from its partner sales portal
  • Fully brandable assets for private label partners
  • Unveiling its first content marketing campaign-in-a-box
Constantly changing 
requirements/benefits
  • Intermedia does not have any requirements for being a partner
  • Intermedia continues to announce new and improved partner program benefits

“As I said in our partner pledge video, the cloud space is highly transformational and growing fast. Intermedia is here to make it simple for partners to profit from it,” says Michael Gold, President of Intermedia. “We already offer a one-stop shop with centralized control over users and services across our partners’ entire business. I’m proud to now unveil even more enhancements to a Partner Program that already leads the industry in its support, its profit potential, and its ability to adapt to our partners’ businesses.”

About Intermedia

Intermedia is the world’s largest one-stop shop for cloud business applications. Its Office in the Cloud™ suite integrates all of the essential IT services that SMBs need to do business, including email, voice, file sync and share, single sign-on, security, mobility, archiving and more. Office in the Cloud goes beyond unified communications to encompass the widest breadth of fundamental IT services delivered by any single provider.

Think of it as a “Business Cloud Platform.” All of Intermedia’s services are integrated into its HostPilot® Control Panel. There’s just one login, one password, one bill and one source of support, which creates tremendous cross-service efficiencies for both users and IT administrators. And all its service offer enterprise-grade security, 99.999% availability and 24/7 phone support with hold times of less than 60 seconds.

Intermedia has 60,000 customers, over 1,000,000 paying users, and 5,000 active partners—including VARs, MSPs, telcos and cable companies. Its industry leading Partner Program lets partners sell under their own brand with full control over billing, pricing and every other element of their customer relationships. Intermedia is the world’s largest independent provider of hosted Exchange.

Intermedia has 600 employees in three countries who manage ten datacenters to power its Office in the Cloud—and who work relentlessly assure customers and partners of a Worry-free Experience™.
Learn more at Intermedia.net.

Contact

Kristen Berry, (650) 691-7318, [email protected]