The transactional era of channel partnerships is over. Quest spent the last year dismantling a program built for a market that no longer exists and rebuilding it around the economics of the customer lifecycle. This is what it means for the future of our ecosystem.
Enterprise customers have changed what they expect from their technology partners. They’re not looking for a vendor who closes a deal and hands off a contract. They want a partner who understands their business, guides them through adoption, helps them grow, and is still there at renewal. They want a partner that is invested in outcomes, not just transactions.
Today’s enterprise customers don’t just buy software. They adopt platforms. They expect their partners to guide them through that adoption, help them maximize usage, and renew with confidence. The partners generating the most durable value are the ones who remain deeply engaged across the entire customer lifecycle, not just at the point of sale.
Our old program didn’t reflect that reality. So, we changed it. Fundamentally.
Why tiers made sense and why we moved beyond them
Revenue thresholds are a practical instrument. They’re easy to measure, easy to communicate, and easy to administer. For a long time, they were the right proxy for partner value. If you were generating volume, you were generating impact.
But a tier-based program asks one question: how much did you sell? As customer relationships have grown more complex, that single question has become insufficient. It can’t distinguish between the partner who lands a deal and moves on, and the partner who drives 80% platform adoption, builds a vertical practice, and manages renewals that keep customers on the platform for years. Both might occupy the same tier. That gap between contribution and recognition is what we set out to close.
Lifecycle economics: The new framework
The new program is built around a concept we call lifecycle economics. The core idea is straightforward: access to benefits and rewards should be proportional to your contribution across the full customer journey, not just one moment in it.
OUR INTERNAL FRAMEWORK
Build · Land · Adopt · Expand · Renew
B-LAER is the lens through which Quest views customer value creation. The new partner program maps directly to this framework — the more stages of the lifecycle a partner owns, the greater their total economics with Quest.
This is the logic we use internally to understand how customer value is created and compounded over time. We now apply that same logic to how we structure our partner relationships. The more stages of the customer lifecycle a partner owns, the greater their total reward with Quest. That is intentional. It aligns our investment with where durable value actually lives.
Three motions. One ecosystem.
Rather than tiers, the new program is organized around three participation motions. These aren’t categories to be sorted into, but rather they are ways of contributing. Most partners will engage across more than one. The incentives are designed to stack accordingly.
Build
IP CREATION & SPECIALIZATION
Partners developing Azure-native IP, practices, vertical-specific solutions, and differentiated integrations that extend Quest’s reach into new markets and customer segments.
Sell
PIPELINE & CO-SELL
Partners sourcing opportunities, registering deals, and executing co-sell motions alongside Quest’s direct team and adjacent vendors including Microsoft.
Service
ADOPTION, IMPLEMENTATION & RENEWAL
Partners who stay with the customer after the deal closes — owning implementation quality, driving platform adoption, and ensuring on-time, high-confidence renewals.
The Service motion deserves particular attention. Under the previous model, post-sale work was largely invisible to our incentive structures. An implementation partner who turned a shaky deployment into a confident renewal earned no more recognition than one who handed off and walked away. That ends. Service partners who demonstrate measurable adoption impact and renewal performance will be explicitly rewarded for that contribution to Customer Lifetime Value.
Why this matters strategically
Redesigning a partner program is a statement about what you believe. It signals which behaviors you want to proliferate in your ecosystem, where you see the future of customer value, and which kinds of partnerships you intend to build for the long term.
We believe the future of enterprise software is defined by customer outcomes, not transaction volume. We believe the channel partners who will matter most in the upcoming years are the ones building deep, outcome-oriented practices today. And we believe the right response to that conviction is to structure our program — our incentives, our enablement, our go-to-market support — to attract and reward exactly those partners.
That is what the new Quest Edge Partner Program is designed to do.
What comes next
Starting today, we’ll be sharing detailed guidance on how to orient your practice around the motions that best reflect your capabilities.
This is not a minor update. It is a rearchitect of how Quest and its partners create value together. I believe the partners who lean into this model, the ones who think seriously about which lifecycle stages they can own and deepen, will be the ones who build the most resilient, differentiated, and economically powerful practices in our ecosystem.
The market has already moved. We’ve built a program to match it.
