Bekker's Blog

Blog archive

Rackspace Rolls Out First Partner Incentives

Rackspace made a big commitment to its partner program this week with the introduction of the company's first-ever partner incentive.

The initial incentive covers Rackspace's strategic tier of partners who sell between $10,000 and $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue for deals covering dedicated hosting services, such as Rackspace Managed Security or Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by Microsoft, VMware or OpenStack.

"Through the end of this year, we'll match the deals they generate with customers dollar-for-dollar," said Lisa McLin, a 15-year veteran of Rackspace who is the new channel sales and alliances vice president for North America as of late June.

As an example, McLin said a partner working on a digital transformation deal for a customer that wants to put Sitecore on a private cloud platform with VMware, storage, firewall and load balancer and Rackspace Managed Security might be a $20,000 a month contract.

"The partner is going to get their $20,000 incentive, plus their monthly residual" on an ongoing basis, she said.

Rackspace has offered spiffs to partners before but this is the company's first full-fledged, ongoing incentive, McLin said. If it goes as well as she expects, she said the company will be looking to offer more incentives.

"We're going to watch this one and see how it goes. Q4 will be really level-setting, where we ask, 'Are we getting good traction on this?'" McLin said. Expansions could involve other products, as well as broader sections of the Rackspace partner community.

Posted by Scott Bekker on August 29, 2017


Featured