Jim DeCarlo, clean code solutions vendor Sonar's new VP of channel for the Americas, has been dreaming of a role like the one he's recently occupied for his entire career.
After 25+ years with stints at Cisco, VMware and other legacy vendors with very mature channel businesses, DeCarlo said he's beyond excited to take what he's learned and apply it to a brand-new program.
"There is this recurring theme about complexity being the opposite of profitability. So, if we can figure out how to come up with a partner program that really focuses on simplicity and strips away some of the complexity, that is the ideal," DeCarlo told ChannelE2E. "Our partners already know what to do. They know how to make money and establish a value-added approach in the marketplace. So, coming to Sonar as the world's leading solution for clean code, the end goal is to help developers bring code to market faster but do it in a higher quality and more secure way," he said.
Sonar has been around since 2008 and has 400,000 organizations already using the technology, DeCarlo said, which the company has accomplished without a channel go-to-market strategy. Coming into the company and being able to build exactly the kind of program he'd always envisioned was a dream come true.
"You know, when I got the call, I thought, 'This is what I've been dreaming about -- walking into a mature company with a giant customer base already and then building the kind of program that I always dreamed of building that's focused on simplicity, profitability and and really stripping all the complexity out of the go-to-market," he said. "Over the years, I learned that 'less but better' is a really good way to evolve a channel program. And that's kind of the focus of our strategy going forward."
The Channel Play for Clean Code
You may be wondering what role the channel plays for a clean code solutions vendor. And the answer, like so much of tech's recent evolution, involves AI, DeCarlo said, at least in part.
As vendors pivot to include new technologies in their products and solutions, customers clamor to adopt them, and channel partners fill the gap in between. Moving to the cloud is a great example, DeCarlo said, as is the push toward integration of generative AI.
"The vendors are like, 'This is going to be a big motion for us,' and the partners capitulate to that, to try to stay relevant with their vendors," he said. "Generative AI is a big industry trend right now, and that's following the big wave of workloads that moved to the cloud. So now, the question is how to align with the AWSes and the Azures and the Google Clouds of the world. In addition to that, you have hyperscaler marketplaces which are a disruptive way for customers and partners to transact technologies and services. As partners are building out this generative AI go-to-market motion and messaging with their customers, many times, that's an infrastructure conversation; how to build the infrastructure for all the generative AI things that you want to do -- and the thing that they're missing and the thing that's resonating with partners today is the source code," he said.
As generative AI becomes an engine to create more code, to analyze data, to do all kinds of things within organizations, Sonar's solution positions partners in a great place to offer services and solutions for their customers that are integrating generative AI, DeCarlo said. That helps customers get generative AI code into their infrastructure faster, which helps them generate better business outcomes faster, he said.
"It's the old 'chocolate cake' adage, right?" DeCarlo said. "The customer doesn't want the ingredients to make the cake, they want the finished cake. So, as we start to become an element of the managed service offering starting all the way to the left, then comes generative AI, source code, clean code, onto the infrastructure, then to the business outcome. We've basically given the partners the opportunity to increase their managed service, to be inclusive of more technologies that deliver better business outcomes and eliminate code that's buggy and has vulnerabilities in it. You can build all the infrastructure you want, but if it's buggy and vulnerable, you're gonna have to go back and deal with all that technical debt," he said.
Rainer Heinold, CEO of Sonar partner ASERVO Software, a Knowmad Mood company, which serves the DACH region, said his firm is excited about the new program and happy they were selected as a partner. ASERVO Software has been working with Sonar on projects since 2019. The company supports software development and the associated processes, methodologies and best practices in Germany. Their experts help organizations to efficiently introduce, deploy, optimize and modernize the software development infrastructure stack on all aspects of DevOps.
The program allows Aservo, as a specialized service organization, to better promote their business and leverage Sonar's brand recognition, Heinold said.
"As a partner, we benefit from joint marketing activities to help us identify new opportunities, regular calls and quick responses that allow a fast alignment on all aspects of a deal, reducing the time to close, and the partner directory which helps us to prominently position our value-add services," Heinold said.
"The focus of a small but dedicated group of different partners reduces price battles and opens more slots for tight interaction with the territory sales team and our channel manager. The administrative overhead is minimal, and Sonar shows a high commitment to the channel business on all aspects. We can also identify many upselling opportunities by converting Community Edition (CE) users to the licensed versions," he added.
It's an interesting value proposition, especially for partners and customers that may not have considered these opportunities, DeCarlo said. Currently, Sonar has hundreds of transactional partners and something like 400,000 customers that translate to 400,000 warm leads for partners in the new program.
Conversations with partners have been very interesting, DeCarlo said, because of the novelty and immense opportunity.
"They weren't intuitively thinking that way -- they said, 'Well, applications in development, that's kind of another group that we don't really sell to ...'. But when we explained and said, 'Hey, we have 400,000 warm leads, and a lot of common customers, and there's a really unique value proposition for you, if you take advantage of first mover advantage and become a Sonar partner," DeCarlo said.
DeCarlo said Sonar's goal over the next year is to increase recurring revenue by 200% and continue to grow the number of partners -- but not at the expense of commoditization and margin pressure.
"Obviously the kind of partner we're looking for is more enterprise or specific verticals, like government, where they are serving large pools of developers. For an SMB, you're going to outsource your app dev; you're not going to have, like, 4,000 developers that would need such a solution," he said. Currently, Sonar has between 10 and 12 such partners and is actively recruiting more.
"I think there'll be a play for GSIs, large enterprise, VARs and MSPs as you start to wrap services around that. And that is a really good services play for some of our DevOps partners, too, that that touch a few different places in the application journey, there's an opportunity for them, too," he said.
