Agiloft still has no partners in Canada, but they are hoping that their just-announced capacity to offer Canada-based hosting of their business process automation offerings will change that.

A year ago, Redwood City CA-based Agiloft announced an expansion of its channel program, whose benefits include high and recurring margins in the 35 to 45 per cent range, with the aim of expanding its small channel significantly. A year later, the number of partners is about the same, but Agiloft has established much deeper relationships with some of these. The company is announcing its first three Platinum Partners, one in the U.S., one in the U.K. and one in Australia. While the company sells into Canada, it still has no Canadian-based partners, although they are partnered with some global players with Canadian offices. However, they have just made Canada-based hosting available, through AWS, which should stimulate their Canadian business, and may lead to an indigenous Canadian channel presence.

Agiloft sells a suite of business process automation solutions, including a service desk suite, a contract management suite, and a help desk, which are available either as a SaaS solution or on-prem. They were founded in 1991, but sold direct most of that time before establishing a channel presence in the last several years. They expanded their channel program and benefits last year in the hope of increasing the number. Things took a difference course, however.

“One of the things that changed over the last year, as the program evolved, was that we shifted the focus to making the partners we had successful, rather than increasing the number of partners,” said Hiro Notaney, Agiloft’s VP of Marketing. “We increased training a lot, making sure that partners understood the power of the platform.”

Notaney said that the partners are at much different stages of development.

“We have a lot of demand right now, much more than we can handle internally,” he said. “Partners help us with the implementation type activities, although we usually do a little handholding and have an Agiloft project manager help with the implementation. As they become more efficient, they can own the whole relationship. The three Platinum partners can do everything. They have received extensive training in Agiloft, and can leverage the platform inside and out. They can also build their own applications on our platform beyond our out-of-the box ones.”

The Platinum partners are regionally diverse. They are Collins Technology Consulting, a U.K-based company that also works in western Europe, Saasam, which is based in New Zealand and covers the whole Oceania region, and Spectrum Mobility, which is based in Texas and focuses on oil and gas.

While the number of partners hasn’t changed much from a year ago, they are hoping that changes this year, and doubling the number of partners would be nice.

“We are in mid-stages of discussions with a couple of the large global integrators,” Notaney said. “These types of relationships take a long time to develop but we likely can make something public in a few months.”

Notaney also indicated that making Canada-based hosting available through AWS may help them appeal more to Canadian based partners.

“In addition to our SaaS option, for entities sensitive about the cloud, usually government, we have had an on- prem option,” he said. “The majority of our Canadian customers have used the on-prem option.”

While federal privacy regulations in Canada do not formally require data sovereignty, some provincial laws and government stipulations do, and general customer preference has clearly moved in that direction in the last couple of years.

“It makes it a lot more attractive to customers to know that we offer the Canadian cloud presence, so for us it’s a major win because we are seeing a lot of demand from Canada,” Notaney said. “It’s something we needed to do, and will also help us in terms of attracting Canadian partners.”

Agiloft also hopes that the local cloud presence will encourage some of the on-prem customers to consider the cloud.

“This might encourage them to move to a hosted solution.” Notaney indicated. “We prefer that, because they get all the feature upgrades and support. It’s all easier for the customer as well because it gets synced up right away.”

Agiloft is in attendance this week at the CompTIA ChannelCon event in Austin TX.