Building strong joint propositions for Equinix and their partners

Challenge

Equinix is the world’s leading provider of interconnection and colocation services, with 180+ data centres in 44 major markets across 5 continents. Equinix is where companies come together to realise new opportunities and accelerate their business, IT and cloud strategies. Platform Equinix is home to a thriving partner eco-system, including more than 1,400 networks and 2,500+ cloud and IT service providers.

Situation

Partnerships are central to Equinix’s business strategy and Equinix has a growing eco-system of partners in Europe, including MSPs, ISVs, SIs, Network Service Providers and VARs. Equinix recognised that to maximise its growth potential, it needed to ensure that it had robust go-to-market plans in place with its partners, based on strong joint value propositions. As Simon Downham, Channel Marketing Manager at Equinix, explained, “Like any vendor, clearly articulating our value proposition aligned with that of our partners is of utmost importance.

Equinix asked Momentum ITSMA (formerly OneGTM) to design and implement a Joint Proposition & GTM Process, working with some of its key partners in EMEA. Momentum ITSMA was selected because of our track record of successfully delivering projects for Equinix, and also our experience delivering similar engagements for other vendors.

Action

We designed and delivered a workshop-based process, designed to ensure that for each partner there was:

• an agreed go-to-market strategy, which had the buy-in of the key stakeholders within each organisation
• a clearly articulated joint value proposition, which could be effectively communicated to internal sales teams and prospective customers
• agreement over the activities that Equinix and the partner would undertake to take the joint proposition to market

Momentum ITSMA initially managed the end-to-end process for each partner, including background research and pre-workshop preparation meetings, leading the workshops, creating documents that captured the workshop outputs, and developing top-level messaging for the agreed joint proposition. The outputs then provided the basis for developing internal and customer-facing assets, such as Joint Proposition Summaries.

Following the initial successful pilot, we then helped scale the program so that it could be rolled out widely across Equinix's partner ecosystem. This involved creating the necessary frameworks, templates and guidance, and training Equinix partner teams to deliver the process themselves.

Impact

A large number of partners have now been through the process and it has been very well received by both partners and internal Equinix teams. The propositions and plans that have been developed have helped accelerate joint go-to-market activity, including sales enablement, joint campaigns and joint customer events. This has contributed to significant growth in partner revenues and bookings over a multi-year period.