OpsRamp, which develops an IT operations platform for service providers and end-customers, recently hired Brian Hartwell as VP of worldwide channel sales. Hartwell, a veteran of Rubrik, Nimble Storage and Dell EMC -- joins the company at a key time.
Partners and customers alike are striving to automate IT monitoring and management across physical, virtual, cloud and hybrid infrastructure. OpsRamp, founded in 2014, claims to fulfill those needs -- while also supporting some of the world's complex businesses and largest MSPs (managed IT services providers).
But what exactly attracted Hartwell to this opportunity -- and what are his key goals for the OpsRamp partner program? In an email interview, he shared these thoughts with ChannelE2E.
ChannelE2E: How did you learn about the opportunity at OpsRamp?
Hartwell: Mike Munoz, OpsRamp chief revenue officer, is a former colleague and deeply respected 25 year Silicon Valley sales executive who has helped build and scale sales organizations for some of the most accomplished technology companies in the world.
ChannelE2E: Was there anything in particular about the interview process or your research about the company that triggered your interest in the position?
Hartwell: Varma Kunaparaju, co-founder and CEO, has over 20 years of experience in high-technology engineering, and has a proven track record of building and delivering enterprise software. Varma has built a world class engineering team at OpsRamp and has coupled that talent with an equally prolific executive leadership team.
OpsRamp is a robust IT Operations platform providing unified resource discovery, hybrid and multi-cloud monitoring, ML/AI for alert correlation and suppression, intelligent notification and escalation, compliance, and remediation. Extreme operational efficiency with tools consolidation provides immediate ROI for those attempting to reduce cost and complexity. OpsRamp provides customers with a model for managing their environments as a service, which changes the margin profile aggressively by taking a product sale to a service contract. Few, if any, other platforms are capable of successfully creating and delivering this type of SaaS offering. The broadness of the platform makes it capable of replacing many point tools that are focused on only segments of hybrid and multi-cloud monitoring.
The IT operations analytics/AIOps market continues to grow at a significant pace with a strong 33.08% CAGR forecast through 2024. The rapid adoption of public cloud services coupled with cloud native patterns (microservices and containers) for building modern applications will require significant rethinking and overhauling of traditional IT operations practices. Digital operations teams will need to build the right skills, knowledge, and capabilities to thrive in a world where technology infrastructure will be increasingly hybrid and new workloads will be largely invisible.
Unlike any other IT Operations platform on the market, OpsRamp provides a truly unified view of an organization’s entire hybrid infrastructure environment. Our platform discovers all infrastructure resources (network, storage, compute, virtual, container, etc.) across on-premise, public / private / multi cloud and hybrid environments. This unified discovery information is critical to improving visibility across hybrid workloads, eliminating potential blind spots within an organization’s hybrid infrastructure, and mapping workloads to business services for next-generation service centric monitoring and escalation.
ChannelE2E: What are your near- and long-term priorities, particularly as they pertain to partners?
Hartwell: With such a strong optimistic market outlook, we are actively pursuing relationships with partners that have embraced the growth potential and established themselves as industry leaders. Both SME and Large Enterprise have sufficiently complex problems and environments to benefit from utilizing the OpsRamp platform. OpsRamp will gain the most traction by approaching Large Enterprise. The OpsRamp message resonates most aggressively with large, complex organizations. This is evident through our current prospect pipeline which has 80+% of opportunities coming from companies with revenues of greater than $1B.
The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) has identified eleven industries or sectors to include Energy, Materials, Industrial, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Health Care, Financials, Information Technology, Telecommunication Services, Utilities, and Real Estate. Information Technology is pervasive and ubiquitous, which means all industries use technology to some extent. This means the entire breadth of industry is a candidate to become a customer.
ChannelE2E: How are you helping partners to engage and succeed with OpsRamp?
Hartwell: OpsRamp provides extensive online training modules to our signed partner community. In addition, we provide hands-on training through shared implementation engagements. OpsRamp has a professional services group who will help construct Statements of Work (SOWs) alongside partners and move the majority of service dollars over to the partner with the understanding that the partner is learning from the deployment engagement. OpsRamp has a proven track record of success utilizing this method with other partners. Additionally, the OpsRamp professional services group is positioned to run at cost and provide our partner base with learning to take over those engagements.
