Partner Program News & Articles

Are you a Sitecore partner? If so, it looks like you can do some virtual mingling with the rest of the gang.

Yesterday Sitecore (news, site) announced the launch of its new Partner Portal, available for every partner no matter their location. The portal will act like a watering hole, allowing partners to come together and access a variety of resources to help them learn, collaborate and develop their Web CMS practices.

The worldwide program includes: interactive marketing agencies, Web development firms, system integrators and resellers. By allowing them to come together, Sitecore says they are reaffirmng their commitment to the partner model as well as improving the quality, depth and detail of the communication with their customers.

"Building a successful website is a process not just a technology," said Paul Markun, VP Marketing, Sitecore. "The new Partner Portal is part of that process of success and gives our partners the online collaboration, knowledge sharing and rich detail needed to deliver dynamic websites. We have always viewed our partners as trusted providers of professional services, and they play an enormous part in our high end-customer satisfaction."

Check out the portal here.

Jahia (news, site), an open source content management system vendor, is on a quest to further penetrate the U.S. market (among others) in addition to its French operations. The new global Jahia Business Partner Program gives partners more control and flexibility with free pre-sales support and various levels of certification, including those for VARs and SIs scenarios.

According to Jahia, they don’t want to compete with their partner network when it comes to CMS implementations. Hence, the “non-compete guarantee.” That means Jahia plans to refer almost all of the integration work to its partners -- around 70 of them in 15 countries around the globe. Some of Jahia’s partners are in the U.S., the market to which Jahia is paying more and more attention.

"Being open source and not competing with services partners is unique within the open source industry… We are focusing on software and its related support…," said Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP and GM for North America.

While having an implementation partner network is a common approach in the industry, why not do that work in-house? Why not move toward a native Professional Services approach? Sure, it’s more costly and requires you to have, grow and nurture the in-house subject matter expertise. While it’s certainly not a deal-breaker in many CMS selection processes, different organizations may feel differently about partner vs. vendor implementations.

[Editor's Note: See our recently released report on the top 20 open source content management systems (including Jahia).]

eZ, the creator of eZ Publish Web CMS, introduced a revamped Professional Partner Network program.

Changes include an updated training and certification program for partners, as well as a better distinction between various partner levels.