Syncplicity, which was acquired by Axway in February, has also strengthened its channel momentum with new funding and leverage of Axway assets.
Ben Miller, vice president of global channels at Syncplicity
Santa Clara CA-based Syncplicity by Axway, which makes enterprise sync and share solutions, recently made significant upgrades to its channel program. The company had dealt directly with its partners, but now has just signed with Ingram Micro to take them to market in North America. The company’s acquisition by Axway in February of this year has also been a significant boost to their channel initiatives, providing an inflow of new resources.
Syncplicity was spun back out of EMC in 2015, after having been acquired by them in 2012. The split from EMC meant that in the short term, their partner resource portal was on the bare bones side. That has now been remedied.
“Our original partner portal was a pretty rudimentary one – basically a landing page with just a couple of documents,” said Ben Miller, vice president of global channels at Syncplicity by Axway. “It was necessarily simple because when we left EMC, we no longer had access to their portal. Since our acquisition by Axway, we have received an infusion of support, including the ability to utilize their partner portal with our resources. We have now added in new features, such as videos to show product lines, and learning training modules.” Other elements now in the portal include white papers, co-branded sales materials, industry data sheets, presentation decks, competitive analysis, customer case studies and sales resources.
Syncplicity has also added a 60-day enablement program to train partners’ sales reps and pre-sales engineers on best practices.
“I like to have a program that’s free to partner, easy to understand and shows partners how to make money,” Miller said. “One of the biggest missing points before was go-to-market planning. There was nothing formal.” Training and demonstrations are offered in a choice of formats, including in-person sessions, virtual classrooms and webinars.
“We also now have turnkey go-to-market programs,” Miller said. “Partners can use our pre built webinars-in-a-box and seminars and brand them as their own. We sit down with them on picked topics and work out a strategy. We want recurring customer events once a quarter, with webinars in between. This brings in more leads.”
New resources have been added to work with partners, with dedicated channel marketing dollars and corporate support from the Axway team.
“We added a new channel manager to work with the channel in Europe, and another one to work with partners in North America,” Miller said. Access to programs and funds through lead generation campaigns are also now available for enterprise-ready partners.
Miller said that Syncplicity’s channel business had been held back precisely because it does not have enough of these enterprise-ready partners – something the expansion of the program was designed to remedy.
“Our goal is to have 90 to 100 per cent of our business go through the channel, but today it is only about 50 per cent channel,” he said. “This is because we don’t have enough go-to partners. We have about a hundred partners in total, but only a handful of them could be considered go-to partners.”
The partner set is likely to expand, because of Ingram Micro signing on with Syncplicity by Axway.
“The Ingram Micro distribution deal will help open our reach to partners in their ecosystem, and allow us to reach partners who we would not have reached before,” Miller said. “This will strengthen us in the mid-market.”
Miller said it should also have positive implications for their presence in the Canadian market.
“We haven’t had a distinct channel strategy in Canada, because we haven’t had the partner ecosystem there,” he stated. “Ingram Micro has a strong presence in Canada. Canada is a humungous market for us, but the partners will be key to that.
“We want to find Canadian partners, both ones who are based in Canada and who sell into Canada.”
