 Hey, everyone, and welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SPP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventura. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here. Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time. The landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape, increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? So there are lots, but I would say the few that we hear consistently are cost, the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go? How do they do it? And then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move? And how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? So talk to me. Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? Yeah, so our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud as we talked about. They're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads? What are the critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them and then bringing us along as part of that. Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and really extension across the board. I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi Ventura's overall strategy. So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales, pre-sales services organization and we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this weekend, they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under 100,000. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. And that's key, right? That synergistic approach, when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? So really that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we bring best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without sort of all kinds of crazy challenges, right? When you look at it, they really want to make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? Wow, so there's tons of ways, but we've created a very simplified what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approved their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. So if you dig in, where is it that Hitachi Ventura is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? Wow, so I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted and simplified engagement with our partner community. Because it's a value-based and ease of doing business, I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high-end perspective and scaled it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagements, where is it that your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? Say that again. Sorry, I bring one. No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? So from the sales cycle, I think because we have a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right-size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi Vantar is helping them to actually close deals faster? So lots of great ways, I think between our pre-sales organization that's on-call and available 100% of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, two years ago, it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote, where today they pre-approved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly. So dramatically faster. Talk about overall, so the partner relationships quite strong, very synergistic that Hitachi Vantar has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving, the market evolving overall and say the next six months, 12 months? Yeah, so we see it significantly. We've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value-added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they want to have the capability to resell the solution but they don't necessarily want to have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny because you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscaler public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. And how is that feedback that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we created which is called PDM plan develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here go sell it, good luck and have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize the solution. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them. What is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and everything else that you're looking at, your security solutions, how do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. In terms of that side-by-side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Ventura as a service business? So our primary go to market with our as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive almost all of our as a service unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say Kim are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward the next say year? Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally, our goal is to be 95 to 100% of all of our business through partners which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants which are really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us and the end users. Trust is such an important word. We can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question, from a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pike? Oh, again, my biggest priority, right? Is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partner. So we really dig in. We right now sit about number one or number two in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand but we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go-to markets as we roll out every year. It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vantara is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in it for customers. We appreciate your insights. Thank you very much. You watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.