Agiloft sold direct until a couple of years ago, but has been expanding its channel, and is looking to its new partner program to attract some quality partners, including ones in Canada, where they presently have none.

Redwood City CA-based Agiloft is relatively new to the channel. It is building out a select network of partners, and to this end has launched an expanded partner program, with high margins of between 35 and 45 per cent.

“Agiloft makes a platform for business process automation, and has a suite of offerings, including a service desk suite, a contract management suite, and a help desk,” said Brandon Wright, Agiloft’s director of partner relations. “It is available as a SaaS solution or on-prem. It uses a wizard based system, can be configured in any web browser and scales up easily. You can deploy a system very quickly with no coding required, and you can configure it quickly as business processes change over time.” Their customers range from startups [there is a seven license minimum] to the Fortune 100. Chevron is a customer.

Agiloft has been in business for a long time – 25 years – but for most of that time they only sold direct.

“It’s just been the last couple of years that we have moved into the channel and focused on our partners there,” Wright said. “In the last year we have grown the number of partners by 300 per cent.”

While the 300 per cent figure is certainly accurate – the number of partners seems to have grown from four to twelve from a year ago, the number of partners remains small. More importantly, the 300 per cent number can create an impression Agiloft is looking to recruit a massive number of partners, which is far from the case. They want a select, value channel, not a volume channel.

“We have about a dozen partners right now, and are looking to triple that over the next year,” Wright said.

Partners have several different ways to resell Agiloft.

“They can sell one of our prebuilt apps, white label us, or develop new applications on the platform itself,” Wright said. “That’s a minority of our partners but it is growing.”

High margins are a major attraction.

“We offer margins between 35 and 45 per cent on on-prem sales,” Wright stated. SaaS sales receive the same percentage of the sale every year that contract is renewed, at the same rate. The partner also retains 100 per cent of related professional service revenue.

“We have a lot of traction in government, education, life sciences, legal and technology companies. Partners who specialize in any of those verticals could take a pre-built template and configure it quickly to focus on that.

Program benefits include co-branded sales and marketing collateral, presale and postsale support, and no sales quotas or minimum sales requirements.

“We provide sales demo videos, and the platform demos very well,” Wright said. In only 2-4 hours, a partner can build a demo system for a prospect.

“We have also developed free online administrator training which makes it possible for new partners to do online and do partner training for free,” Wright added.

Canada has been a good market for Agiloft, but the channel does not yet exist.

“We’ve been selling direct there, and we have customers, and a lot of Canadian leads coming in,” Wright said. “We do not have any Canadian partners at the moment though. It’s wide open. I could see a half a dozen solid partners up there based on demand I’m seeing from our internal sales team.