TD SYNNEX Unveils the Missing LINK
The distributor’s new PartnerLINK community is designed to foster go-to-market collaboration via trust-based relationships.
TD SYNNEX, as we wrote previously, is a big enough believer in the reinforcing interplay of communities and trust to have named Kristi Kirby its first-ever senior vice president of North American communities last year.
“If you look truly at the rate and pace that technology is evolving and how the landscape is changing, we realized there’s no way for partners to be experts at all that,” Kirby told me this week. “They’re looking for a solution, and they’re looking for help in terms of how to take advantage of the market opportunities.”
Communities, and the relationships they foster, are where they’re finding that help. Kirby (pictured), still new to the job when we discussed it five months ago, hinted then at emerging plans to make TD SYNNEX’s community an even more powerful vehicle for partner-to-partner collaboration but said I’d have to wait for details. The wait ended this week with the unveiling of PartnerLINK, a re-branded, re-tooled successor to the former CommunitySolv program offering expanded benefits tied to four core principles: Lead, Innovate, Network, and Knowledge.
Which spells LINK, part of why LINK is embedded in PartnerLINK’s name, along with the organization’s mission, as Kirby describes it, “to help pair folks and provide an environment where trust is a foundation and everybody understands that being in this together is better than going at this alone.”
Though the ultimate goal is to help everyone partner in whatever combination market needs demand, PartnerLINK is segmented into four sub-communities with similar interests and objectives: PartnerLINK Ascend, for U.S. providers of AI, security, cloud, and analytics solutions; PartnerLINK Advantage, for U.S. providers of the advanced infrastructure that Ascend solutions run on; PartnerLINK Canada, for partners north of the border; and PartnerLINK Public Sector, for specialists in … well, you can probably guess what.
An online hub designed to help members find and collaborate with one another is coming soon. Like much about PartnerLINK, it will be a modernized version of a time-tested resource.
“That’s the beautiful thing with communities. They’re not a new concept in the sense that they’ve been around for a really long time,” Kirby says. “We said there’s no need to break that foundational formula, but how do we take that as a foundation and go ahead and enhance it?”