How Clickhouse ensures they are a partner-first organisation
Derk van Ogtrop, senior director, Alliances APJ at Clickhouse discusses partnering with Confluent and why they are focusing on partners in 2026.
For open source platform Clickhouse, they believe the only way they will scale as an organisation is by leveraging the channel ecosystem.
Derk van Ogtrop, senior director, alliances APJ at Clickhouse has been at the company for less than a year and explains why they’re becoming a partner-first organisation.
He said the open source company is early on their journey in building their go-to-market strategy.
“My role is to establish the way we engage with partners. Onboarding partners, and making us easier to consume as a technology, and then hopefully making our partners super successful.”
He added, “The more successful and profitable they become out of leveraging our technology, the more likely they are to invest further into our technology, which makes us successful, and makes our customers successful.
“That tri party engagement becomes positive, so my responsibility is to make that happen.”
Van Ogtrop is aiming to have three to four key partners in the Australian market, and maximum 30 across JAPAC. One of their current technology partners is Confluent.
“That will probably be for the next 12 to 18 months before we think about scaling further,” he explained.
In Australia, they are currently working with two types of partners, the SIs and the mid-tier, boutique partners that have 20 to 30 staff working for them.
“Because of our go to market motion, we align very heavily to the hyperscalers,” he said.
“Inevitably, we will be working with partners who have a very strong AWS, Google or Azure practice, and have very strong relationships with those particular organisations as well.”
Their ideal customer sits in the telco, FSI and technology space. One of their customers includes Aussie startup darling, Canva.
The company was born in the digital native, cloud-first era in 2009, where many organisations were self-serving and engineering-based.
Van Ogtrop explained as Clickhouse began to mature and work with more enterprises, they saw how those organisations were heavily reliant on partners.
“If you look at a bank, it was born to be a bank, not born to be a professional services organisation, to know all of these technologies, or a retailer, or whatever it might be,” he said.
“As we move up that value chain, those partners become critical to our success, because they will have often relationships with these customers that far exceed our understanding and in terms of all of the technology that they understand.
“They will often have worked already in that bank or in that retailer or manufacturing company, and so they have an inherent knowledge that's important in how we fit into that engagement and into that into that technology stack.”
Van Ogtrop explained that if they’re going to grow at the pace they are – which is more than double every year – then they need to have scale.
“We simply cannot hire enough people. We ourselves don't want to be a professional service company. We want to be a technology company, and so we want to rely on those trusted partners that have that skill,” he said.
Partner-first organisation
To be a partner-first organisation, van Ogtrop said Clickhouse need to have two factors.
"You need to have the support of the leadership. You need to have a leadership that wants to go that direction, because there's many ways to go to market, and they will have the pros and cons,” he said.
One of the reasons he joined Clickhouse was because being partner-first was a “top three priority” for the organisation.
“It’s difficult to build a partner strategy unless you have that level of support and that was there from day one,” he said.
“They were willing to make change, which is not easy for a company that's growing this fast, to pivot direction.”
The second factor is having the people who make the company work, the people at “the coal front”, such as the marketing and sales teams.
"They also need to be behind that motion, because it is an extension. You have to have transparency and trust to be able to share and engage and have that trust with the ecosystem for it to work,” he said.
“As long as you have that willingness, then everything else just becomes a function of the doing and making it happen.”