Relyenz takes over the managed services that CharTec had added to sell to their MSP customers, has added a new one, and plans to keep adding new services backed by Tier 3 support.
Leonard Dimiceli, Relyenz’s VP of Sales
CHICAGO – At the CompTIA ChannelCon event here this week, MSP training firm CharTec announced that it has created a new division, Relyenz, which will distribute the products it had been selling over the last several years to its MSP customers to a much broader MSP channel.
“CharTec teaches MSPs sales, marketing, profitability and how to grow their business, but over the last five years or so had also begun to sell them products that they recommended,” said Leonard Dimiceli, Relyenz’s VP of Sales. “They were really doing this reactively, moving product as part of the process of teaching them how to sell. It became a significant enough part of their business that they decided they wanted someone to lead it and expand its operations.”
Relyenz is a value added SaaS distributor, and Dimiceli was hired to run it because his background is in value-added SaaS distribution. Five years ago, he launched SpamSoap, which became Nuvotera, and recently sold it. Some former Nuvotera employees have since joined him at Relyenz.
Relyenz has a couple hundred MSP channel partners that they inherited from CharTec, and the plan is to increase that by tenfold by the end of next year, which will include going global.
“Canada is about 10 per cent of our partner base now, and it’s one of the bigger growing markets for us,” Dimiceli indicated.
In addition to itself, Relyenz is also announcing its CentralPoint Security Platform.
“We have built a platform, CentralPoint, where partners will be able to provision, monitor, maintain and manage our services. That’s a key differentiator for us. It integrates into ConnectWise today, and Autotask is on the roadmap.”
Relyenz started with four services that it inherited from CharTec from Sophos (unified threat management), Reflexion (email protection and encryption), Axcient (disaster recovery as a service) and StorageCraft (backup and disaster recovery). At launch, they have also added a new vendor and service, Passportal, which offers password protection and management as a service. The plan is to regularly bring new ones on board every few months.
While Relyenz’s management has been split from CharTec, the corporate connection is still important for Relyenz.
“We are uniquely positioned with CharTec and see this as a strong cross-sell opportunity,” Dimiceli said. “We have a lab where we can test the products we bring to market, so that we can make sure they will be proven to work as promised. We can also make sure that they are promotable products on which MSPs can make good margins.”
Dimiceli also pointed out that they are a true value-added distributor, with the service capabilities that entails.
“We provide full Tier 3 support of all the products an MSP acquired from us,” he said. “They don’t need to call the vendor at all. There is one throat to choke.”
Dimiceli said that, in his view, strong channels are the only way to run an MSP business.
“I’m a firm believer that people buy from people they know and trust,” he said. “Channels are a relationship, not a transaction. Buying direct is a transaction. Channel partners and MSPs buy from people they trust and like. Being involved in the CompTIA cloud community helps us here as well.”
