It's time to dispel a myth that suggests born-in-the-cloud channel partners don't exist. Yes, they definitely exist. Finding them isn't all that hard. You simply need to shake up your travel schedule.
Classic channel partner conferences certainly remain valuable. But in some ways attending those events are akin to dining at the same restaurants over and over again. If you're constantly consuming fine French food, it's hard to imagine how an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet somewhere on the other side of town operates and turns a profit.
Keep going to your favorite channel gatherings. They're valuable. But take a serious look at conferences that attract born-in-the-cloud channel partners. Here are 10 of them.
1. AppDynamics AppSphere: Mainly for corporate DevOps teams that want to master application performance monitoring (APM), AppSphere is starting to attract channel partners. You'll find our coverage of the conference here.
2. AWS Re:Invent: The mother of all cloud computing conferences. And yet the vast majority of traditional channel partners have yet to attend. That's quite a mistake.
3. Google Cloud Next: Google's core cloud summit attracts partners, developers, IT decision makers, and Google Engineers.
4. Google I/O: Sure, it's mainly a developer show. Roughly 3,000 developers surface at the conference. But you'll also find most of the top Google G Suite (formerly Google Apps) partners in the crowd. Dates for 2017 have yet to be announced.
5. NetSuite SuiteWorld: One of the first SaaS companies to introduce a cloud channel partner program, I'm curious to see how SuiteWorld evolves now that Oracle owns NetSuite...
6. New Relic FutureStack: This traveling conference series focuses heavily on application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, mobile app monitoring and alert optimization. New Relic's cloud tools are popular with corporate IT teams. But guess what: Roughly 160 channel partners -- including quite a few pure cloud players -- attended this week's FutureStack conference in San Francisco. See our coverage here.
7. Salesforce Dreamforce: An obvious choice. And a ginormous event.
8. ServiceNow Knowledge: ServiceNow's service desk platform attracts plenty of internal IT departments. But poke around. You'll see plenty of pure-cloud integrators on hand. In fact, Accenture has been buying some of them up.
9. Sup-X Startup Expo: The conference and expo attracts 1500+ startup and early-stage entrepreneurs, angel and VC investors and related service providers from throughout North America. Yup, you'll find partners there...
10. Bonus: TechDay: A regional event designed for startups. Thousands of them. The New York event is expected to attract 35,000 attendees. Wow... who knew? (Actually, ChannelE2E did...).
11. Bonus: Technology Services World: Yup, there's plenty of managed services and recurring revenue conversation here.
12. Bonus: World Hosting Day Global Conference: WHD.global is a conference that attracts 6,500 technology executives and customers from the IT hosting world.
13. What Did I Miss?: Where are you finding, meeting and learning from born-in-the-cloud channel partners? Email me ([email protected]) and I'll potentially add the conference to the ChannelE2E Technology Event Calendar.
See you on the road in 2017 -- at classic channel conferences, and at the pure cloud gatherings...
