The future of the partner model is outcome, not hours: Boomi

Boomi’s global alliances chief said AI is forcing partners to prove the value of the outcomes they deliver.

As AI threatens the typical partner model, cloud integration specialist Boomi has been working with a single goal in mind — improve the connection between partners and the business.

“We had one benchmark — partners are receiving value because they're programmatically bringing us in and benefiting from delivering services and solutions to their customers,” said Dan McAllister, senior VP global alliances and channels, Boomi.

McAllister joined the business almost four years ago, when only about 50 percent of Boomi revenue was aligned or influenced by a partner, with a mission to lift this metric.

“My goal was to get us to 90 percent, and we did that in two years. We went from a very partner-forward organisation to an extremely partner-forward organisation,” McAllister said, speaking from the Boomi World Tour event in Sydney this week.

For McAllister, forging closer ties with its own partners is the path to combined strength and the safest way to adapt to the changing landscape.

“Boomi is the systems integration product and there's a category of partners called ‘systems integrators’. There's a reason why we use the same words,” he explained.

The secret sauce is combining Boomi’s experience and knowledge from its customer success, services and consulting businesses with its sellers for the benefit of partners and how they go to market.

“Every opportunity, more or less, that Boomi works on with our clients is sourced or influenced in some positive way by our partner ecosystem,” he told CRN Australia.

McAllister believes that how they go to market is often where a lot of companies fail, particularly a lack of flexibility in how they enable partner businesses to sell their solutions.

“It's easy to say I'm going to enable my partners, but then some companies try to force those partners to do business with them in a certain way,” he said.

McAllister pointed to all the way partners can provide Boomi solutions — referral, resell and MSP programs, and embedded within their products and solutions — as the key to success because it can fit into any part of the sales cycle.

“We allow the partners to ask, ‘What's the most frictionless way for me to go to market and deliver value to my customer, and then how can Boomi help me do that?’,” he said.

As part of its efforts to lift partner revenue, Boomi has overhauled its partner portal, automating processes and taking the knowledge in its ecosystem, from McAllister’s own team, in the seller's business, and made it available as self-service.

“It’s helped partners understand any benefits they have and what is available to them from referral fees, marketing budget and other benefits such as training,” he said.

But there are warning signs on the horizon. As AI comes to dominate customer engagements, McAllister sees partners’ business models being challenged.

“They’re expected to deliver a tremendous amount more productivity,” he said.

The typical business model was delivering billable hours, but increasingly customers are shifting to an outcome-based model, and that’s changing the price equation. It’s why he’s focused on supporting partners to deliver more integrations without adding headcount by drawing on Boomi’s ecosystem.

“Our partners have to be more specific about the value they provide to their customers,” he ended.