 All right, so it's eight o'clock and it's and being that I'm the host I think it's probably time to start So thank you everyone for coming. This is my turn to give my functional update and Was that someone just speaking no I got a hand raised though No, I don't okay Sorry about that. I'm not used to presenting on zoom Anyway, so I'm going to give it an update being that this is my first one of the of the year I'm going to recap last year and give a forward-looking plan for what I'm doing this year I shared the slides in the meeting invitation. So if you have been with issues or you just want to look at them offline you can Sort of start with a 12 month recap will use the outline that Brittany put into the Meeting designation will start off with accomplishments So for the last 12 months when since I came on board and started the the channel partner program We've onboarded 10 new channel partners. So we have we currently have 12 Total and I'll get into that in a minute We've had three new hires myself We hired someone to do marketing enablement back in November and just in January. We had Shagang join us for a technical enablement Which is really important both of those tasks are really important the marketing part because partners strive for recognition and Legitimacy in their markets a lot of times customers aren't sure if they really have an affiliation with us And if we perform joint marketing events with them, that certainly helps on the technical enablement side That's important as well because they typically will carry seven eight sometimes even ten Products in the development tool space so they can never be complete Experts out the door on our product not so they've been working for a while. They've had a bunch of training And so we need to be able to support them in their deals As well as provide them with the training for them to become self-efficient sufficient at least the beginning The channel added 35 net new names Last year which doesn't sound like a lot Except when you take into account that the vast majority of those resellers did not come on board until the last half of the year And then needed time to come up to speed. It's actually pretty good And with Francis coming on board we enabled the sales force comm partner portal So the resellers now have access or most of them anyway have access to our Salesforce comm system which means they can interact with our our sales team and our in the BDRs who sometimes pass them Leads and be able to do their own coding and other things straight from within sales force Which should certainly help with stuff moving forward So the next up on the agenda was concerns or starts off accomplishments and concerns So in the last year we off-boarded two partners, right? So I said that we We brought on 10 when we off-boarded to The first one that we off-boarded was a company called mouse off that of Korea They onboarded and off-boarded in the same year And interesting enough the biggest reason they off-boarded was because they are an Atlassian reseller as well And Atlassian told them that they needed to either stop selling get lab or Stop selling Atlassian which I took as a complete another compliment that Atlassian sees us as that big of a threat that they are Challenging their reseller in Korea to cease to sell get lab The second reseller we off-loaded was not a surprise anyone that was when disco when disco was a product-based reseller meaning that They bundled us with some of their products It was a product line that they ceased to support themselves. And so that wasn't really a surprise to anybody The other concern is is that marketing resource that we that I mentioned was a high point that we hired Well, we've lost the marketing resource in the last 12 months Which was gonna? Caused some issues and I'll bring up on the on the next slide wouldn't want to talk about blockers and help needed and the The resellers had a disappointing financial contribution from my standpoint I was wanting them to do between two and three times the amount of revenue that they did I Don't think they did all that horrible Compared to the amount of time they've been on board or the amount of support We've been able to give them but I still would have preferred them to have done much better so The next up in the gender border players are stalled and need help so where I'm stalled and and where I need help I'm stalled in the same place that the rest of the sales team is is that we don't have a lot of sales enablement collateral and again, this comes back to the fact that the resellers carry many many different products and Therefore they rely upon the crutches of having pre canned demo scripts and sell sheets and Your free formative PowerPoint presentations and so forth all lined up for them to be able to use Because if you imagine if they had to create their own for you know, 12 or more products that they wouldn't have any time to actually sell And also team growth. I spent a lot of my time doing sort of maintenance tasks And I need to add to my team to actually manage the partners are on board so I can build the program Larger and recruit more more resellers The biggest part where I need help though is is in the partner marketing enablement The the resellers are quite noisy on marketing. They do lots of marketing the local regions one of the reasons that we look for resellers in Places like Korea or South Africa or what have you is those markets are too large for us to ignore but Too small or too difficult for us to address directly And so they perform tons and tons of marketing tests in those in those regions for us on they they host meet-ups they they they do webinars to do all sorts of stuff and Right now. I we don't have a dedicated resource to help with that Which means I need to lean on about a dozen different people in the marketing organization to help me get to make these things happen And another part of that as well is I don't have a budget for some of the Things that they want to do where it doesn't overlap what we would normally do on our corporate marketing needs and and I need to I need some help with that as well That's one move on and we'll talk about goals And so by the end of 2017 I Want to be able to have complete coverage in markets in what I call partner markets Which are again those places where it is they're either too small for us to address directly or too difficult for us directly So a place like Argentina is too valuable to ignore But it's too small for us to address directly in a place like Korea or China. It's just too difficult for us to direct address directly And I want to be able to say that we have a competent reseller in each of those markets Before the end of the year and we're actually the vast majority of the way there And I want to hire a channel marketing manager to help them with their opportunities and manage them through their their requests And everything that they need so that I can spend time on Recruiting partners in other areas as well as both the program I also want to implement a badging program for technical expertise So I mentioned before that resellers have Validity issues right they they need to prove themselves valid to their market They need to to show that they are legitimate and one of the ways to show that they are legitimate is To show that they have been blessed by us in some way Right and and a good way to do that which also helps preserve our brand Is to ask them to participate in a technical badging program meaning they go through A technical training by us To show that they are competent to perform Consulting and other things and support and what have you along with our product And that they actually give back to us by Contributing to our source And so that's one of the reasons that we hired Xiao Gang at the beginning of the year is he built a badging program for his previous company And he's going to help build that moving forward and that should Actually also help enable us to recruit a whole slew of a different style of partner called a service reseller And so before I was talking about the market resellers and market resellers are like I said Based in locations or verticals that are difficult for us to address Service resellers are different Service resellers make most of their money not necessarily selling product But by selling their services Most of it last season's resellers around the world fall into that category They're they make their money selling consulting around Atlassian And we don't really have our own direct consulting teams. As a matter of fact it we We are sort of unable to offer those services for for any price to the vast majority of our customers who want help integrating with third party solutions converting from wherever they were before or You know Doing a full-blown CICD Integration and implementation and so there is a market for us to have A lot of companies out there who are technically expert in our product to be able to do these things And those guys if they're going to make money off of selling services around GitLab They are very well motivated to make sure that lots of customers have GitLab And so if we give them a small margin and we give them the training and the backing They will go out and push to all of their customers GitLab so that way they can get the service revenue And having a badging program is critical to be able to do that I also want to be able to enable government channels with by having fulfillment resellers meaning that people who are on the government schedules and I actually Have come close to meeting this right now Our reseller in colorado release team just managed to secure a gsa listing Which means that now it makes it easier for us government agencies to purchase GitLab If they purchase them through release team release team might not be Large enough to handle where we think that market is going to go But it gives us a a solution for that right now The other thing I want to be able to do is add a bunch of new product-based resellers What I mean by our product-based resellers is that's a reseller that makes most of their money Selling their own product and selling GitLab helps them sell that product So if you think about pivotal and perforce those are two great examples, right? They both resell GitLab as a means to help them sell their own product And they tend to be pretty low maintenance It's not a whole lot of of work you have to do once you get them on board which makes them Really worthwhile And currently right now I have three product-based resellers that I'm that I'm talking to that I hope to bring on before the end of the year One of them before the end of this quarter They won before the end of this quarter is a company named Contact Software They do a product life cycle management solution Another one is Swisscom and the third one is PTC PTC is also a PLM solution Swisscom wants to do a hosted GitLab as a service sort of like a GitLab.com for paid for Another goal I have for the end of the year is to make sure that the channel is fully trained As a matter of fact before the end of this quarter I want to have them have gone through basic training to begin with and I'll get more into that in a minute A fully trained channel is a channel that is fully equipped to sell our product and support our product and to make more revenues And hopefully all this will contribute to substantial revenues to our company's bottom line So for Q1, I sort of want to focus on some channel enablement I know Amara's got a bunch of collateral She's getting ready to give us and my friend she just gave us a slide deck the other day I want to make sure that all of this is available to the channel and they are trained on how to use it And and and exactly what it is. That's important because it's hard for them to conduct a lot of Sales activities without my intervention if they don't have that So currently whenever they have a decent size deal and they need someone to give a slideshow I get a phone call and I get up in the middle of the night and I give a A slideshow to a customer and that that's not scalable and we need to get these materials in their hands and I'm trained to use it We also need to Promote them which is part of the legitimacy, right? Currently only three of our resellers have had a press release saying that they are a reseller We need to fix that every time we sign a reseller then you're a press release Four of our resellers have had a campaigns In their territories to say hey, we now have a partner in this territory You might want to want to contact them. We need to do that for all of them And we also need to to plan a launch event, which is sort of like a Meetup on steroids where they invite all of their Local customers and we invite all of our local names to a meetup And someone from git lab shows up and we talk about why we chose that partner and how valuable they are and and one of Our mutual customers talks about what the reseller What value the reseller brought to them and how git lab solved the problem of theirs And that's a that's sort of a a big event to kick start them and get a lot of people interested in git lab because the more Resources they devote to git lab at the beginning of their relationship the more they will continue to devote as time moves on Um, I also need to with Francis's help do a bunch more salesforce.com automation We already have it on a bunch of automation to keep them on top of their open opportunities and their leads There's a there's a bit more we need to do but that's going along Really well I also want to grow our reseller base I want to add Another product based reseller and that is probably going to be contact that I mentioned before they're they Are rare to go and want to have us launch for for their q2 And I want to add two new market based resellers this this quarter. So those are in territories that are hard for us to address I have several that i'm in talks with There's a contract out to a reseller in taiwan And it looks likely i'm going to have one in argentina as well Maybe even before the end of the month. So i may be able to exceed that goal for q1 The u.s. Government fulfillment partner like I said, we've already got a release team on board for that And I know chad's been talking to some large organizations that do strictly just fulfillment It may be able to make that a bit easier And I want to begin the process of interviewing a channel manager to manage those Market-based resellers so that I can then concentrate on building the program and looking for more resellers So we've gone into q2 In q2, I hope to launch the reseller badging program That is that again the program where we're going to sort of certify the resellers on their technical expertise And chad is is hard at work in figuring out What existing trainings we have that we can use to leverage and what new things need to be put in and what sort of structure needs to be put in place In order to have that work I'd also like to do three of those launch events that I mentioned earlier And and be able to get that legitimacy campaign started One of the things I wanted to do for the resource as well is to have a quarterly Get lab university style event There's no way I could get them to watch every get lab university video. We have that comes out every single week but if we Went through what we did in a quarter and pulled out some of the highlights and then did another get lab university session Targeted at the resellers I think it would really help their understanding of our product and keep them motivated to To sell us as well as keep us on the top of their mind, which is really really important And as part of that badging program that we want to launch by the end of the quarter I want to have at least three of them badged Badging is different from training. It's going to take a lot more effort on their part Also, I want to have At the end of q2 three more market resellers on top of what we already have And being that we have the badging program on board I want to start recruiting service resellers and so I want to have at least four of them And I want to add that second product based reseller And for the second half of Of 2017 More of the same really I want to have more of the launch events. I want to badge more of the resellers And I want to add a whole bunch more resellers a lot more service based resellers because They get real low margins and they We can afford to have lots and lots of them all over the place Um And again, I want to add another product based reseller because this as time goes on those will prove Really easy To manage and move forward