In a recent blog we discussed the importance of vendors and service providers proactively supporting their channel partners during the current Covid-induced crisis. OneGTM client, Equinix offers a great example of how a company can move quickly to help partners, and by extension those partners’ customers, to respond to the challenges presented by COVID-19.
COVID-19 putting IT networks under pressure
In the first few weeks COVID-19 transformed the way that most businesses operated. One of the biggest changes was the dramatic shift to home working. One study found that 88% of organisations encouraged or required their employees to work from home during that time.[1] This led to massive increases in business internet and VPN traffic – internet traffic surged by up to 40% in some affected areas[2] while business VPN traffic spiked by a staggering 165% during mid-March.[3]
This undoubtedly put enterprise IT networks – which were not built to support a large remote workforce – under intense pressure. As a result, many employees struggled to reliably access their business apps and the collaboration tools they relied on, which resulted in frustration and lost productivity.
Longer term transformation required
Businesses needed to take immediate action to address those challenges. But beyond the need for short-term fixes, it’s also become clear that longer-term transformation is required. Many things have changed irrevocably – with companies such as Twitter and Facebook announcing that many staff can continue to work from home permanently.[4] Firms need to adjust to completely new ways of working and new ways of engaging with customers, partners and suppliers, and as a result will need to make fundamental, long-term changes to optimise and then transform their IT infrastructure.
Helping partners help their customers respond
Equinix, the world’s leading provider of interconnection services, is ideally placed to help businesses overcome their urgent infrastructure challenges and plan for the future way of working. Equinix’s services enable companies to rapidly scale network capacity, and also allow them to connect directly to all major cloud and collaboration providers within Equinix facilities.
Working with partners is a central part of Equinix’s go-to-market strategy, so Equinix – with some support from OneGTM – has created a two-part COVID-19 Partner Response on-demand webinar series. The first chapter helped partners understand how they can utilise Equinix’s services to solve their customers’ most urgent and critical IT problems, while the second chapter explored how Equinix’s tools can help partners plan for customers longer term infrastructure optimisation.
The programme has been created and delivered in very short timescales and is supported with a range of partner enablement resources. The Equinix programme ticks a number of boxes that all vendors should be considering at the current time: it communicates the relevance of Equinix’s solutions within the new reality we’re all dealing with, it provides valuable support to partners as they try to adapt to a very different landscape, and it focuses clearly on solving the problems that customers are most concerned about at this time. It also provides a great example of using digital events to engage partners at a time when more traditional f2f methods are not possible. We were delighted to have the opportunity to work with Equinix on this programme.
Click here to find out more about the Partner Rapid Response series.
Or if you’d like to discuss how OneGTM could help you support your channel during this challenging time please contact us here
[1] Gartner (March 2020), https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-03-19-gartner-hr-survey-reveals-88--of-organizations-have-e#:~:text=survey%20of%20800%20global%20HR,they%20showed%20coronavirus%2Drelated%20symptoms.
[2] Fierce Telecom (March, 2020) https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/a-surge-usage-due-to-covid-19-networks-are-fine-for-now-nokia-deepfield
[3] Computer Weekly (March, 2020) https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252480461/Coronavirus-global-VPN-deployments-rocket-since-11-March
[4] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/tech/work-from-home-companies/index.html
