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Contentful responds to market shift with new partner program

mike-johnston Profile

Enterprise leaders need cutting edge digital products and experiences faster than ever. Contentful is supplementing its best-in-class technology offerings with a new program of complimentary agency and implementation partners. These partners can help customers navigate their digital transformation journey and deliver projects faster than ever.
The new Solutions Partner Program focuses on agencies and consultancies that can enhance how modern organizations transform and deliver digital experiences. Contentful's content infrastructure is a core component of modular-based architectures, which not only help customers push products and experiences out faster, but also give them a leg up in an omni-channel world.
The purpose of Contentful's partner program is to empower a network of agencies and consultancies to deliver tailored services to our growing customer ecosystem, recognize partners that are doing the best work with Contentful, champion them to our customers, and grow the content infrastructure market.
The ultimate goal: Give all Contentful customers access to trusted experts to help them build and deliver projects on Contentful.
Responding to demand
We’re making this shift because it’s what the market demands. In recent years, our customer base has steadily expanded from smaller, innovative projects to large-scale, digital transformation initiatives in some of the largest enterprises in the world.
Contentful is recognized as a core piece of infrastructure that supports every customer or employee product and experience. This evolution has been driven by the massive market shift in the way digital products and websites are created — away from legacy CMS solutions and toward infrastructure stacks.
With our new partner program, enterprises will get all of the help they need to fulfill their digital objectives. Today, ten of the 11 leading agencies in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Global Digital Marketing Agencies are Contentful partners or customers, including R/GA, AKQA and SapientRazorfish.
We solve our customers’ biggest concerns by combining partners who are industry experts with Contentful’s solutions. For example:
  • Technology solution consulting: “How should I think about incorporating Contentful into the rest of my technology stack across my organization?”
  • Content model consulting: “How should I set up and maintain my content model to take advantage of Contentful's ability to make content reusable?”
  • Implementation: “How do I migrate from my old solution to Contentful in the least painful way, while avoiding the pitfalls of complex migrations and still focusing on our end customers?”
  • Change management: “How do I enable my organization to adopt and utilize Contentful easily?”
  • Ongoing or adhoc content and front-end services: “I just need more developers to get through this cycle, and they need to know Contentful: Do you have any partners that can help me staff up?”
Speeding up digital transformation
Enterprises are adopting Contentful for one of two primary reasons. Customers just getting started with Contentful want to build amazing digital products. Others have already built projects and are looking for organizational transformation where every experience is powered by Contentful.
Legacy CMS solutions are no longer optimal. Their one-size-fits-all approach leaves enterprises struggling with bloated solutions that, while they do everything, don’t do most things very well. Instead, enterprises that need to ship products fast and meet customers where they are want an all-star stack of technology providers and partners that deliver exactly what they need.
With our top-flight partners, enterprises can access trusted advisors to help them realize their digital potential with less risk and at greater speed.
Enterprises won’t have to acquire new and hard-to-find talent, because the best talent is within our partner ecosystem. Whether enterprises are looking for a partner to help with a single project, a complete transformation or even a partner by region, we’ll have one to recommend.
By relying on Contentful and partners, enterprises can concentrate on what they do best, and leave content management to the experts.
Partners also benefit
Our partners, meanwhile, get streamlined partner sandbox accounts with the ability to start developing immediately. This is a huge step beyond legacy CMSes, where there is no such thing as rapid prototyping.
Partners will also be eligible to co-market with Contentful, get assistance with business planning and internal navigation, and potential access to client introductions.
To help customers get the most out of Contentful as quickly as possible, we typically advise customers to get started with Contentful in one of three ways: via a customer driven implementation, a customer and partner-driven implementation, or a partner-driven implementation. In any of these scenarios, Contentful’s customer success organization will be part of the team. We’re already hard at work on a certification program, and partners will be divided into five classes:
  • Power: The highest level of Contentful's partner program, Power Partners have the most experience building and launching large digital projects with Contentful. They can be trusted with any Contentful project, no matter how large and complex.
  • Premier: Premier partners have done three or more full-feature implementations with Contentful and are on their way to becoming a Power Partner.
  • Professional: Have executed at least one full-feature implementation of Contentful.
  • Strategic Industry: Leaders in a specialized field, such as content modeling or custom web apps.
  • Community: Partners that are just getting started with Contentful and may specialize in smaller Contentful-related projects.
Driving change
Contentful is modernizing the web by powering the transition from legacy CMS to content infrastructure. With our new partner program, this transition will occur faster than ever.
Our global network of partners is dedicated to making customers successful, accelerating speed to value and empowering customer teams through content services. We look forward to helping our customers find the right solutions and partners that enable them to unlock their organization’s full value—today and in the future.