nGenx has mainly sold through a telco agent channel in the past, but has redesigned its partner program to also appeal to MSPs, and plans to sign up a large number of them.
Max Pruger, nGenx’s Chief Sales Officer
Hosted workspaces provider nGenx has enhanced a new partner program for managed service providers which includes a new white label program for Desktop-as-a-Service delivery.
The Evansville, Indiana company has been around and in what would become known as the cloud since 2000. Their primary line of business is virtual desktops, although they are also involved in line of business application hosting, including Office 365, Exchange and Quickbooks.
“Our market focus is SMBs, and we sell one hundred per cent through the channel,” said Max Pruger, nGenx’s Chief Sales Officer. “Amazon’s service offering is a shell compared to ours.”
While they have an offering with Citrix, they have particularly strong connections with IndependenceIT.
“We use their software and add our hardware underneath it,” Pruger said. “They are moving to software only, and we have annexed their sales staff as they pivot away from services. It’s a joint decision fully supported by both companies.” Scott Markley, whose background is in the delivery of services, and who was a senior vice president for IndependenceIT, recently moved over to nGenx as a Channel Sales Executive.
“We lead on value of service rather than price, but we are a large provider in this space and so have economies of scale which we can pass on.” Pruger said. They also offer Tier 1 through Tier 3 support.
“We sell through telcos, ISVs, VARs and MSPs, although we have not had a lot of penetration historically among MSPs, Pruger said. “Telcos and their agents, along with ISVs, were the main channel.”
Pruger recently joined nGenx from Kaseya, and is used to selling through MSPs.
“We just didn’t have a focus in that MSP space,” he said. “We didn’t attend their events. MSPs are used to buying products differently from telcos and you have to sell to them differently. Our expectation is that by the end of next year, the MSP channel will be about a third of the business.”
The new MSP-focused partner program is expected to drive this growth. The sales model has been changed for MSPs as well as telcos.
“Before we sold through an agent model where the MSPs have a buy rate and get discounts as the volume increases, and that has now changed to a more MSP-friendly model,” Pruger said. “The telco master agents’ model used to have the same margin, but has now been broken down by size. They also now have the option of selling above the MSRP.”
nGenx has also borrowed a training model from Kaseya, Pruger’s last employer.
“If you partner with us, we will fund the three month training,” he said.
A white label program for DaaS delivery that allows for greater control of all sales, customer support, and billing has also been introduced. So has a unique Selling the Cloud training program to help partners develop a comprehensive cloud strategy. The company is also touting its distribution of qualified sales leads, its rewards and incentives program, and its competitive commission structure.
The program has been in the pilot stage for large MSPs since the beginning of July, with good results.
“We are already reaching out to larger partners,” Pruger said. “We plan to sign up hundreds of new MSPs. Just in the last month we signed up roughly 400 through adding one franchise and one aggregator.”
