Chef Introduces New Global Partner Program Purpose-Built for 100 Percent Open Source Software

New partner strategy incentivizes top system integrators and channel partners to fully engage enterprise users with Chef Enterprise Automation Stack

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chef, the leader in DevOps, today announced a new channel program specifically designed to ensure that partners and customers are able to take maximum advantage of Chef’s 100 percent open source business model. The Chef Partner Program (CPP) creates three tiers of partners -- Principal, Senior and Junior -- with the highest benefits and incentives applied to those who drive the strongest results for themselves and their mutual enterprise customers using Chef Enterprise Automation Stack.

“One of the strongest drivers for Chef’s business model shift in April 2019 was to optimize alignment of our partners’ efforts to engage global enterprises with the full capabilities of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack,” said Vikram Ghosh, vice president of business development for Chef. “This new program helps ensure that customers get the most out of their Chef deployments, not only in terms of features and functions, but also with regards to partner-delivered services, content and ongoing collaboration from Chef and its partners.”

The new Chef partner program is designed to enable more business opportunities for partners, with a focus on delivery, training and support for the full stack. Partners in each of the CPP tiers have the tools, training and incentives they need to engage existing and prospective customers to achieve success in using the full Chef Enterprise Automation Stack to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

New Program Benefits

• Full-margin recurring revenue model, enabling partners to grow their share-of-wallet within customers and own the complete customer lifecycle
• Co-sell incentive model for partners who don't see the need to transact products as part of their services offering
• Co-marketing support from Chef, allowing partners to use Chef’s customer outreach programs to reach newer audiences/customers
• Chef Not-for-Resale licenses that enable partners to drive trials and use Chef’s binaries for internal deployments
• Special discounts for ChefConf sponsorships and attendance
• Optimized sales and technical enablement tools and programs

Chef Partner Program Quotes

“2019 was a real turning point for Chef in terms of both its business model and its platform capabilities, driven by the creation of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack,” said Sharyl Jones, DevOps service manager at Indellient, a Chef partner. “We and our users appreciate the increased collaboration we have had with Chef, which will only be accelerated by the new partner program.”

“Chef’s shift to 100 percent open source enabled us to move from a tool-and-implementation-focused to a platform-and-solution-focused sales model, bringing us even closer to our customers and creating more value for everyone involved,” said Pradeep Nair, head of DevOps consulting at Relevance Labs, a Chef partner. “The new incentives and go-to-market resources introduced with this program further our commitment to Chef and help us further the reach of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack.”

“This program gives us the incentives and the resources we need to help ensure that the benefits of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack deployment are both well-exposed and well-understood by enterprises in New Zealand and the greater Asia Pacific region,” said Steve Wotten, chief technology officer of NTT New Zealand, a Chef partner. “Its growing capabilities address a wide variety of critical needs for our customers and the new business model is driving accelerated engagement and collaboration among our users.”

Chef will host a live webinar on the new partner program on February 19. Attendees can register here.

About Chef

Chef is the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef helps scale continuous delivery pipelines making it faster and safer to add value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development, packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more information, visit http://chef.io and follow @chef.