Corda Partner Program

By Ricardo Correia, Head of Partners, R3

“Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to service, making sure the other people are more powerful than us.” — Jack Ma

Whilst Jack Ma was referring to Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, he could just as easily have been referring to R3. R3 is an enterprise software firm who, along with its ecosystem, developed Corda, an open-source blockchain platform built specifically for businesses. Corda enables businesses across every industry — from financial services and healthcare to oil and gas — to transact directly using smart contracts, while ensuring the highest levels of privacy and security.

As the Head of Partners at R3, I can tell you that we go to market entirely via our partners. It’s our partner-first philosophy that has enabled us to establish the most impactful ecosystem of partners in the enterprise blockchain sector — having tripled in size over the past 12 months to over 170 partners worldwide.

Importantly, this philosophy extends to engaging with partners of all sizes ranging from global technology companies and systems integrators to small start-ups. In the spirit of an open-source platform, all are welcome, and all have an equal opportunity to build their solutions and services on top of Corda. In September of this year, we extended our offering by launching the beta of the R3’s Marketplace, a web platform that brings R3 partners and members together to discover solutions built on Corda. Impressively, over 60 solutions have been listed thus far across a range of use cases in the healthcare, energy, insurance, trade and banking sectors.

As we looked to the future, and at how we should continue to grow the Corda ecosystem into 2019 and beyond, the R3 team considered a range of factors. This included, not just the size of the ecosystem, but the quality of the interactions and the opportunity for our partners to maximize commercial opportunities.

Today, I am proud to announce the launch of the Corda Partner Program. The Corda Partner Program is a structured program designed to accelerate new partners through the full lifecycle of engagement with Corda, including: onboarding/enablement, application build/service delivery and distribution/ commercialization. It consists of several tracks designed to engage different types of partners and their unique needs. The Solution Partner Track is the first we will launch (subsequent tracks within the Partner Program will be launched in 2019–20). It empowers ISVs and startups to accelerate their efforts to get their applications live on Corda, with minimal hurdles and access to support when needed. Ultimately, R3’s goal is to help our partners reduce the time-to-revenue and provide a greater opportunity to reach new customers.

We are delighted to see the vision of a rich Corda Ecosystem become a reality; I look forward to growing it from 170+ partners to a significantly larger number in the very near future, driven by our new structured partner program.

Please join us at marketplace.r3.com/partners