Dive Brief:
- Yugabyte rolled out a partner program earlier this month, calling on channel firms to help drive adoption of its cloud-native database. The ten-year-old startup is best known for YugabyteDB, a cloud-based, open-source distributed database.
- The program was built around two engagement models rather than a traditional tiering structure. Partners can refer sales to Yugabyte and earn uncapped incentives or resell the company’s database software for recurring revenue, Rohan Thomas, VP of global partner sales and business development at Yugabyte, told Channel Dive.
- “We wanted to create something that uses our natural alignment of existing partners, not impose on them a cumbersome, complex program,” Thomas said. The program has tracks for strategic cloud partners and independent software vendors, as well as distributors, resellers and solution providers, which includes systems integrators and services providers, he added.
Dive Insight:
Yugabyte’s channel strategy evolved organically as enterprises invested in data estate modernization initiatives and reached out to partners for technical support and guidance. The company hired Thomas, whose resume included a five-year stint at Microsoft and three years as a global system integrator strategy leader at AWS, in January of last year to forge a formal partner program.
“I had seen a lot of partner programs during my tenure at Microsoft and AWS,” Rohan said. “I wanted a simple model with refer and a resale that lets partners introduce qualified opportunities or, on the other side, increase resales that were happening naturally already.”
As enterprises raced to prepare their data for AI operations, Yugabyte added vector search and an agentic AI assistant to its PostgreSQL database last year. In May, the company rolled out an agent-friendly storage architecture called Meko that gives developers a shared layer for memory, knowledge, conversation history and observability.
Meko was deployed as a managed service earlier this year but the company aims to open source the software eventually.
The partner program is a work in progress. Currently, Yugabyte is working with more than a dozen partners, according to Thomas, including Wipro and Sonata Software. The company has also solidified ecosystem partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud.
Yugabyte is providing onboarded partners with deal protection, training programs, certifications and marketing support. Thomas has his ear to the ground, listening for partner feedback.
“This is not the one and done system,” he said.
