July 20, 2023 — SEATTLE — Upbound, creators of the popular open source project Crossplane, today announced the Upbound Partner Program to enable a rapidly growing ecosystem around cloud-native control planes. The new program enables partners with resources, technical expertise and support capabilities to deliver Crossplane-based development platforms built on Upbound. Joint customers can benefit from an enterprise-ready platform designed to address infrastructure management challenges across technologies and vendors.

“As platform teams build out internal developer platforms (IDPs) for their organizations, they are turning to control plane technologies such as Crossplane to standardize their platforms and streamline their processes. Upbound’s partner ecosystem aims to provide platform engineers with an even wider array of Crossplane-enabled tools and services that bolster the centralized control and extensibility of their IDPs,” said KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Senior Analyst, RedMonk.

Technology partners play an essential role in the Crossplane ecosystem. In joining the program, partners are empowered to build Crossplane providers for the Upbound Marketplace, free and available for any user to find and install in their own Crossplane control planes. New Upbound Partner Providers expand the ecosystem of supported providers, authored and maintained by the partner and verified by Upbound as compatible with its products and services. Aviatrix created a new Partner Provider, enabling clients to incorporate their products with their platform confidently.

“We’re delighted to deliver the Aviatrix Crossplane Provider, the first Partner Provider in the Upbound Marketplace. With this development, the power of Aviatrix Secure Cloud Networking is available directly from within Kubernetes, and can be easily configured using standard GitOps tooling for fast and flexible application delivery,” said Mitch Connors, Open Source Lead, Aviatrix.

Partners Benefit from World-Class Cloud-Native Expertise

The partner ecosystem gets the expertise of the cloud-native Crossplane experts at Upbound with opportunities to access training and resources for building integrations and collaborating on sales and marketing activities.

Upbound has four partner tracks:

• Technology Partners: Independent vendors can build, test and publish solution-level integrations of their products and services with the Upbound platform. Companies can work with Upbound for joint marketing opportunities. Upbound welcomes Ankasoft, Aviatrix, and VMware as its inaugural Technology Partners.
• System Integrator Partners: These partners are trusted and experienced consultants and advisors that provide customized solutions to clients implementing modern IDPs. They can generate new revenue by addressing the growing need to help customers modernize their developer platforms. Accenture, Navteca, and 24x7 Systems are among Upbound’s System Integrator Partners.
• Resellers: Upbound works with a global network of resellers to give customers a path to purchase products, services and support where it makes the most sense. Genpact, NextGen Systems, and Tech Mahindra are recent additions to the group.
• Cloud Partners: Upbound partners with major cloud service providers to deliver well-integrated and optimized infrastructure using Upbound. Official Providers for Upbound’s supported cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure, are in the Upbound Marketplace.

Partners who have demonstrated market success with Upbound and Crossplane are eligible for go-to-market support. Upbound offers the ability to register opportunities for co-sell, field enablement, solution-level marketing and dedicated access to the partner team.

“We’re excited to partner with Upbound to develop leading-edge solutions for the NASA Science Cloud, using Crossplane Compositions to deploy the Open Science Studio for fast, self-service access to cloud-based Jupyterhub and HPC services,” said Ramon Ramirez-Linan, Co-founder, Navteca.

“Upbound has consistently delivered deep Crossplane control plane expertise, solutions and support to Accenture’s clients. We’re excited to scale our partnership as control-plane-based architectures become more broadly adopted,” said Jan Willies, Platform Architect, Accenture.

Interested partners can visit Upbound Partners to learn more, join the program, and register for co-selling opportunities.

“The groundswell of innovation from the cloud-native community around Crossplane is creating tremendous opportunity for Technology vendors, System Integrators and Resellers,” said Rob Clark, Vice President of Partnerships at Upbound. “Upbound is committed to providing world-class training, support and product solutions that enable new opportunities and increased value for partners delivering the next generation of IDPs to their clients.”

About Upbound

Upbound is democratizing the best-kept secret in cloud computing — the control plane. By leveraging custom APIs, cloud engineers are no longer hindered by configuration drift, multiplying workspaces and frustrated developers. With Upbound, platform engineers get centralized control, governance and stability and developers get the freedom of self-service.

Upbound is the creator and maintainer of the popular open source project Crossplane, a framework for building cloud-native control planes. The company is a Series B startup and has raised $69M in total funding. Upbound’s backers include GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital and Intel Capital. For more information, visit upbound.io.

UPBOUND and the Upbound Logo (the “Marks”) are trademarks and service marks of Upbound, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. You are not permitted to use the Marks without the prior written consent of Upbound.

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Media contact

Kelly Tenn

press@upbound.io