DigitalOcean Refreshes its Partner Program as the DigitalOcean AI Partner Program

In a revamp of its longtime partner program, cloud platform vendor DigitalOcean has unveiled its new DigitalOcean AI Partner Program, designed to bring broad new benefits and support to partners within the overall DigitalOcean AI ecosystem.

The updated DigitalOcean AI Partner Program aims to enhance AI development and accelerate time to market for partners while creating a growth engine to help them better serve their customers and increase revenue, according to the company.

The updated program includes new features such as access to DigitalOcean’s developer marketing engine; opportunities to connect with developers through hundreds of annual community, customer, and partner events; and joint product development opportunities and access to markets that give partners the ability to offer products and services directly to DigitalOcean’s more than 640,000 customers. New developer marketing support with a strong focus on video, social media content, and tutorials is also included, giving partners access to DigitalOcean’s global audience of more than three million technology users.

The new AI Partner Program also extends services to several new categories of DigitalOcean partners, including AI startups and AI-native startups, leading infrastructure providers, systems integrators, and venture firms, all of which can now access customized partner services and marketing assistance.

Wade Wegner, the company’s chief ecosystem and growth officer, told ChannelE2E that the focus on partner needs is critical.

“As we have been scaling the Gradient AI Agentic Cloud, the feedback we received and our learnings from working with our current partners—technology platforms, systems integrators, and venture firms—directly influenced the program,” said Wegner. “The decision to include AI-natives and startups stemmed from feedback and demand from these customers regarding co-marketing and joint go-to-market planning. Those features are typically included in a partner program, so we pivoted the requests into this new program, with a focus on helping them differentiate in a competitive AI landscape.”

The program improvements are designed to create mutual growth and reinforce how valuable partners are to the company, he said. “Increasingly, AI startups and natives are requesting go-to-market support and looking for deeper relationships.”

The updated partner program, along with the company’s AI ecosystem and its agentic cloud, also aims to help AI-natives and digital-native enterprises create and deploy AI applications for their customers using DigitalOcean’s scalable cloud platform.

Initially, the revamped program is not available for all partners, including MSPs, but they will be included in the future, said Wegner.

The Start of a New Trend in Improved Partner Programs: Analyst

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, told ChannelE2E that DigitalOcean’s partner program changes are a positive move in today’s AI-enabled business environment.

“Their aggressive use of agentic AI in this program should significantly enhance it and showcase how this technology can be used, while assisting partners in understanding those uses,” said Enderle. “This is a way to use this technology effectively in high-touch programs where the cost of staffing to the level needed would be impossible. Agentic AI can do this without people and be as or even more effective than people if properly trained and implemented. Thus, this is an excellent way to both use the technology and improve on those uses so they get two benefits at once.”

Enderle said he expects to see more companies bring AI into their partner programs.

“This is not a one-time thing,” he said. “It is becoming more of a trend where companies are using AI to help more effectively spin up partners on AI. It represents a best practice and is worthy of praise in that regard.”