The new Yugabyte Partner Program, unveiled today, provides resources, incentives and standard operating processes for the company’s growing ranks of channel partners who are incorporating the YugabyteDB database into their AI solutions and cloud-based applications.
Yugabyte is launching its first partner program as it works with a growing number of solution providers amid surging demand for the company’s distributed database platform fueled by customers assembling AI infrastructure and undertaking data transformation initiatives.
Yugabyte has long worked with the channel, including systems integrators, solution providers and service providers, on a more one-to-one basis. The new global Yugabyte Partner Program offers partners a more consistent framework and standard processes, along with new incentives, technical enablement resources, and joint go-to-market strategies, CEO Karthik Ranganathan told CRN in an exclusive interview.
The new partner program also reflects a change in the marketplace. Ranganathan (pictured) says that until about two years ago Yugabyte largely sold its products direct to enterprise customers with partners a way to extend its sales reach.
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“What we’ve been noticing for the last year to two years is that there has been a dramatic acceleration on the partner front,” the CEO says.
Yugabyte, headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., targets its PostgreSQL-based database as a foundation for developing globally distributed, mission-critical applications and—more recently—for AI-powered applications and agentic systems.
The development of AI systems and the move to cloud architectures are driving sales of the company’s YugabyteDB flagship database, Ranganathan said, because of the need to transform the data layer that supports those initiatives.
And as enterprise customers adopt cloud architectures and implement AI systems, they are increasingly turning to solution and service providers, systems integrators and ISVs that have the customer relationships, the expertise, and the “complete solutions” to pull off those initiatives, the CEO said.
One such Yugabyte partner is IT services and consulting giant Wipro, which partners with Yugabyte, leverages its database technology and, in 2020, invested in Yugabyte in its Series B funding round through its Wipro Ventures venture capital arm.
“When our clients are looking to modernize their data stack or build new applications, PostgreSQL has grown in importance and Yugabyte is the premier PostgreSQL [database] for demanding enterprise use cases across relational, graph and vector stores,” said Ali Wasti, managing partner at Wipro Ventures, in an email interview with CRN.
Wasti said the Wipro-Yugabyte partnership is pushing its joint solutions “into AI data infrastructure, including agentic AI workloads, where a resilient, PostgreSQL-compatible data layer is becoming foundational.”
“As AI adoption accelerates, clients need databases that can support scale, resilience, cloud flexibility, and emerging capabilities such as vector search and graph search,” the Wipro executive said. “That makes database modernization less of a back-end technology decision and more of a strategic enabler for future-ready digital and AI transformation.”
Yugabyte Partner Program Details
Partners “are essential” and “play a huge and critical role” in helping customers “unlock the business value” of these distributed, agentic AI systems, CEO Ranganathan said. And partners are also critical as Yugabyte expands geographically and can serve customers where the company does not have a presence.
“All this makes it a very natural time for us to put a partner program in place,” Ranganathan said.
The broad move to replace legacy databases with next-generation database systems like YugabyteDB are also a major demand driver today, according to the CEO.
The new partner program, being unveiled today, is now operational and already includes channel partners such as Arus, eGuardian, Hexacluster, Inspirer, Mindgate, Ory, Sonata Software, Takara and Wipro. Other partners in the program span global systems integrators, cloud providers, regional resellers and distributors across North American, EMEA and Asia Pacific.
The program offers deal protection, Yugabyte University training and certification, joint go-to-market planning, marketing support, proof-of-concept resources, and streamlined onboarding, according to the company. Ranganathan said the program provides partners with “more of a self-service, automation-driven model” in how partners engage with Yugabyte.
Rather than traditional tiers, the Yugabyte Partner Program is designed around partners’ business models and go-to-market strategies. The program offers two engagement models: Referral partners who bring qualified opportunities to Yugabyte and earn referral incentives; and resell partners who sell YugabyteDB directly, own the customer relationship, and generate recurring revenue through software resales.
The program includes five partner tracks: Strategic Cloud Partners, Resellers, Solution Partners, ISVs and distributors, according to the company. Resellers and solution providers will engage with the vendor under the Yugabyte Master Partner Agreement while strategic cloud providers, ISVs and distributors will participate through separate, track-specific agreements.
Anticipated Outcomes, Expected Benefits
“Our partners are already delivering the hardest version of this work, standing up YugabyteDB centers of excellence inside major banks and training engineers on distributed PostgreSQL in a matter of weeks,” said Rohan Thomas, Yugabyte VP of Global Partner Sales and Business Development, who is overseeing the Yugabyte Partner Program, in a statement. “This program exists to make that repeatable in every market we operate in.”
“The new partner program will strengthen collaboration around go-to-market activities, enablement, certifications, pipeline development, and customer success,” said Wasti at Wipro. “What we are most looking forward to is the ability to scale the partnership in a structured and predictable way. Wipro has already been investing in training, workshops, and certified talent development around Yugabyte, and a structured partner program will provide a framework to scale those efforts further.”
“The biggest benefit is that the program will support us as we pursue strategic AI transformation opportunities with greater confidence,” Wasti said. “At the same time, expanded technical support, training, and certifications for Wipro architects and engineers on distributed SQL [will be available] through Yugabyte’s enablement programs. This will strengthen our delivery capability and help us build a larger pool of Yugabyte-skilled practitioners across our teams.”
While Yugabyte is always seeking new partners, Ranganathn said the main purpose of the new program is to improve how it works with current partners to handle the growing volume of business, rather than leverage the program as a recruitment vehicle.
Earlier this year Yugabyte struck a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services through which the two companies have accelerated their joint go-to-market efforts and technical collaboration. That included helping customers modernize their mission-critical applications for the cloud and migrate database workloads off legacy database systems.
Ranganathan said the AWS SCA, in addition to showcasing Yugabyte’s market momentum, also dovetails with the new partner program in that many of the channel partners and cloud service providers Yugabyte works with are also AWS partners.
Working through the AWS Solution Provider Program and AWS Channel Accelerator Ecosystem, Yugabyte will make it easier for partners to develop and deliver database solutions through established cloud procurement and go-to-market motions, Ranganathan said.
