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SolarWinds Launches New Partner Program

SolarWinds unveiled a revitalized partner program, marking a strategic evolution of how SolarWinds supports partner-led growth. 

The program introduces new benefits, enablement, and demand generation investments designed to help partners scale, compete more effectively, and deliver stronger customer outcomes.

“Our enhanced 2026 Partner Program provides a renewed foundation to drive great customer outcomes and an improved overall partner ecosystem,” said Barb Huelskamp, VP of Global Channel Sales and Alliances. “By aligning our strategy with our purpose, mission, and CARE values, we’re establishing a framework that can support predictability for our partners and scalable growth for partners and their customers.”

The refreshed program includes multiple updates that span a host of program pillars. These updates include:

  • New Tiered Benefits — As partners achieve higher program tier status, they will have access to more program benefits. This will include lucrative incentives based on metrics such as channel-initiated growth. As partners grow and invest, they will see higher discounts. To accomplish this, SolarWinds is working with distributors to cascade the benefits and requirements of the partner program to resellers, including published reseller benefits. SolarWinds will also pilot a rewards center in North America that will allow partner sellers to accrue points towards rewards such as cash and prizes.
  • Enhanced Marketing Investments — Recognizing the need to consistently build and sustain pipeline, SolarWinds is expanding its investment in partner-led demand generation. Based on program tier, partners will gain access to enhanced marketing support designed to help generate qualified demand and accelerate growth. This includes proposal-based marketing funds, co-brandable assets, and ready-to-execute campaigns in a box available through the partner portal. These enhancements reflect an opportunity for partners to provide solutions and scale for demand more effectively in their markets.
  • Elevated Enablement — Building on the 2025 program updates, such as role-based certifications, 2026 enablement opportunities will improve on that curriculum. Partners will also have access to new enablement content, and specializations based on subject matter expertise or services and verticals, including public sector.
  • A Better Partner Experience — In 2026, partners will enjoy a more innovative partner experience with an improved partner portal. This will include streamlined deal registration, lead sharing, a better NFR request process, and helpful partner onboarding/business planning checklists.

“This program reflects our serious commitment to a partner-first culture at SolarWinds,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of SolarWinds. “By equipping partners to help customers predict disruptions, reduce risk, and recover faster, we enable real operational resilience. These investments are focused on accelerating time to value and helping partners deliver meaningful outcomes for their customers and solve complex problems via simple, secure, and powerful solution.” 

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SolarWinds Launches New Partner Program

SolarWinds unveiled a revitalized partner program, marking a strategic evolution of how SolarWinds supports partner-led growth. 

The program introduces new benefits, enablement, and demand generation investments designed to help partners scale, compete more effectively, and deliver stronger customer outcomes.

“Our enhanced 2026 Partner Program provides a renewed foundation to drive great customer outcomes and an improved overall partner ecosystem,” said Barb Huelskamp, VP of Global Channel Sales and Alliances. “By aligning our strategy with our purpose, mission, and CARE values, we’re establishing a framework that can support predictability for our partners and scalable growth for partners and their customers.”

The refreshed program includes multiple updates that span a host of program pillars. These updates include:

  • New Tiered Benefits — As partners achieve higher program tier status, they will have access to more program benefits. This will include lucrative incentives based on metrics such as channel-initiated growth. As partners grow and invest, they will see higher discounts. To accomplish this, SolarWinds is working with distributors to cascade the benefits and requirements of the partner program to resellers, including published reseller benefits. SolarWinds will also pilot a rewards center in North America that will allow partner sellers to accrue points towards rewards such as cash and prizes.
  • Enhanced Marketing Investments — Recognizing the need to consistently build and sustain pipeline, SolarWinds is expanding its investment in partner-led demand generation. Based on program tier, partners will gain access to enhanced marketing support designed to help generate qualified demand and accelerate growth. This includes proposal-based marketing funds, co-brandable assets, and ready-to-execute campaigns in a box available through the partner portal. These enhancements reflect an opportunity for partners to provide solutions and scale for demand more effectively in their markets.
  • Elevated Enablement — Building on the 2025 program updates, such as role-based certifications, 2026 enablement opportunities will improve on that curriculum. Partners will also have access to new enablement content, and specializations based on subject matter expertise or services and verticals, including public sector.
  • A Better Partner Experience — In 2026, partners will enjoy a more innovative partner experience with an improved partner portal. This will include streamlined deal registration, lead sharing, a better NFR request process, and helpful partner onboarding/business planning checklists.

“This program reflects our serious commitment to a partner-first culture at SolarWinds,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of SolarWinds. “By equipping partners to help customers predict disruptions, reduce risk, and recover faster, we enable real operational resilience. These investments are focused on accelerating time to value and helping partners deliver meaningful outcomes for their customers and solve complex problems via simple, secure, and powerful solution.” 

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As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

40% of organizations deploying AI will implement dedicated AI observability tools by 2028 to monitor model performance, bias and outputs, according to Gartner ...

Until AI-powered engineering tools have live visibility of how code behaves at runtime, they cannot be trusted to autonomously ensure reliable systems, according to the State of AI-Powered Engineering Report 2026 report from Lightrun. The report reveals that a major volume of manual work is required when AI-generated code is deployed: 43% of AI-generated code requires manual debugging in production, even after passing QA or staging tests. Furthermore, an average of three manual redeploy cycles are required to verify a single AI-suggested code fix in production ...

Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...