Trust, Transparency and Teamwork: The pillars of Yotta Infrastructure’s partner framework

Hiranandani Group’s newly formed data centre arm, Yotta Infrastructure, is confident of offering a distinct value proposition to its partners and the end costomers. In an exclusive interaction with CRN India, Bhavesh Adhia, Head of Alliance and Channel Partnership, Yotta Infrastructure, explains the company’s focus on the partner ecosystem and business strategies

Please provide an overview of Yotta Infrastructure’s partner ecosystem?
Our plan is to have over 75 per cent of business through partners. This is something that we are committed to from day one. In today’s business parlance, ‘cloud first’ is the term which every CIO, CTO uses. Further enhancements have been to mobile first, or mobility first. Similarly, it’s ‘partner first’ for us. As part of our entire partner ecosystem, we are trying to create simple effective frameworks for all partners, built around 3Ts – Trust, Transparency and Teamwork.

We have classified our partner ecosystem into four categories. We have the Alliance Partner Framework, a simple transfer price based model for large system integrators. Yotta would provide services on transfer price to the partners and then partners will top-up and add their own services and bundle our services as part of their offerings. We bill the partner and the partner bills the end customer. The Technology Partner Framework is created clearly for technology partners – OEMs/ISVs/SaaS partners or any partner – who are having a specific technology offering and would work with us and bundle our services as part of their core services. The Consulting Partner Framework focuses on partners who would like to understand more about Yotta and its differentiators. Lastly, we have the Reseller Partner Framework.

We have structured an effective reseller framework around our 3T model which will provide them:

• Recurring commission payouts for the entire duration of the customer contract without having the fear of losing control over their customer. That signifies the trust part.
• Recurring commission payout which is flat for the entire duration of the customer contract. Our partners enjoy the same commission percentage for services for entire duration of the customer contract.
• We have also extended complete transparency by providing partner commission based on Actual Billed Value (ABV) and not only on Actual Contract Value (ACV) or purchase order (PO) value. With this, the partner gets complete commission payout for all the variable service components like bandwidth, compute, storage, etc.
• Additional to the Reseller Partner Organisation Commission, we are also extending an additional percentage payout to the sales representatives of the partner organisation. This will be paid directly to the partner sales representatives for every deal closed by them. For us, the partner sales representative is an extended sales team member of Yotta and in this way we treat the partner sales representative the same way as we treat our own internal sales teams.
• We believe in complete teamwork with our partners and hence there will be only a single lead in the Yotta System, whether it comes from partner or directly to us. This will provide a seamless transaction experience for the customer and no-conflict scenario in our case as our sales teams and partner sales team work on the same opportunity as a unified team.
• Lastly, we are also introducing a One-time Referral Commission based on Total Contract Value (TCV) for partners who would just like to refer a lead and not engage actively as part of the deal cycle.

As part of our framework, the partner has complete liberty to decide as to, what services of Yotta does he want us to work with. This can be discussed by them for every opportunity and Yotta will only work in areas where partners want us to work and not interfere with the services which they are offering to his customer. We are onboarding partners on a continuous basis. Currently, across all the four categories, we already have 18 to 20 partners onboarded. We are in discussion with atleast another 12 to 15 partners.

As a new entrant, what is your pitch for partners?
We discussed and took feedback from the existing partner community before drafting our policy framework. There is always scope for improvement and we will keep doing that as we get partner feedback on a continuous basis. We are a new entrant, but the value proposition that we are bringing on table is tremendous, both for the partner and their end customers. We have an excellent cost savings proposition which the partner can straight away extend to their existing and new customers. Additionally, the big difference for us is that we will be only building Tier IV data centres and at the same time, provide economies of scale to our customers because of our land ownership, building ownership, our own construction, along with power generation and distribution, and the data centre domain knowledge.

What are your efforts in terms of partner enablement?
As part of our Reseller Framework, we have a standard accelerator payout, which is on top of the standard recurring commission. This will be paid to partners based on the annual business generated on a financial year basis. Also, we are not differentiating with partners in terms of the size of the partner. The accelerator program applicable for any partner. We are providing an equal opportunity for all of them to grow with us.

Enablement is part of our partner program. When we onboard partners, there is an enablement program as part of the partner onboarding where we would go through the entire cycle of enabling them on our services. Along with data centre co-location, we will also have Yotta cloud services. We will be offering partners a complete white label reseller portal, which will provide them a single orchestration layer to sell Yotta Cloud, or third-party cloud services. Apart from this, we will also provide our partner portal for partners as self service – registration of new lead, updating opportunities, online training, commission payout statements, etc. Currently, we are on boarding our entire partner team. They would be on board by the time
we go live.

As part of your enterprise business, are you focusing on large corporates or the SMB segment as well? How tough is the market from Yotta’s perspective, and how compelling will be your proposition?
For us, it’s about the entire spectrum of customers – SMB, mid-market, enterprise, etc. India’s data centre industry is witnessing entry of new players in the market; this is driven by many positive factors such as the government’s push towards digitisation, data localisation, cloud adoption among enterprises and increased consumption and creation of online content. This gives enough room to all data centre providers to leverage their strengths and exist in the market.

Yotta is a managed data centre service provider that designs, builds and will operate large-scale hyper density Uptime Institute Certified Tier 4 data centres. We have been able to create massive economies of scale with the help of our group companies owning the land, construction capabilities, power generation, and distribution to build highly cost effective propositions for our clients. Our first building at Panvel’s data centre park will go live in January next year; that campus will have five buildings and 30,000 rack capacity. The first building will have 7,200 racks, which is almost 45 per cent more than any data centre in the country today. We have a plan to build 11 data centres across Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Chennai over the next six to seven years.

What’s your broader message for your existing and prospective partners?
As Yotta, we are going to offer partners the 3T based complete framework. Partners need not worry about losing control of their customers. Once they are on-boarded to us, they still retain the current customer control. They would get complete lifecycle pay-outs for a customer opportunity also, which is flat payout, throughout the cycle. We are here to grow along with the partners. We are happy to on board all and anyone that believes in our story.