GlobalSCAPE recently added an iPaaS offering to their established managed file transfer solution, and have made some improvements to their channel program to respond to increased channel interest.
Gary Mullen, GlobalSCAPE’s VP of Marketing
GlobalSCAPE, a 20 year-old company that has been focused on the commercial managed file transfer [MFT] space, recently broadened out into the integration platform as a service [iPaaS] market. Their broader solution set has made them more attractive to a broader range of potential partners. Accordingly, they have made some tweaks to their channel partner program to respond to their needs.
“While we have had consumer products in the past, we are now a pure play B2B company, and up until June of this year, we have focused on our core product, our Enhanced File Transfer [EFT] platform,” said Gary Mullen, GlobalSCAPE’s VP of Marketing. “It moves unstructured data. In June, we introduced our Kenetics iPaaS, which moves structured data, especially from cloud applications.”
Mullen said the expansion of their solution set was dictated by the congested nature of the managed file transfer space.
“It’s a mature market, with little to no green fields opportunities, so is mainly a displacement market,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to create a growth market by pushing into an adjacent technology. This is morphing us into more of a data integration company.”
It is also making GlobalSCAPE of interest to prospective partners who hadn’t looked at them before,
“The enhanced opportunity from the push into adjacent markets lets us go after partners who weren’t that interested in us before,” Mullen said. “The larger data opportunities now make us more interesting to them, with both our robust MFT platform and a robust data integration platform sitting alongside of it. It broadens our ability to recruit the right kind of partners. That’s a big reason for the changes in the program, as we work on expanding that channel opportunity.”
GlobalSCAPE has a hybrid go-to-market model, with sales divided about equally between direct and partners, and focused on the same part of the market.
“We do extraordinarily well in the middle to upper-end of the midmarket and the enterprise,” Mullen said. “The middle of the midmarket is our real sweet spot. Our North American channel is also midmarket-focused. We have solutions for SMB, but our product set is more midmarket and up. We don’t play in the small to very small space.”
GlobalSCAPE’s channel program goes back about five years, and has grown fairly consistently year over year. They presently have about 400 partners globally in 15 countries.
“85 to 90 per cent are North America-based,” Mullen said. “That’s where we focus the lion’s share of our resources.”
Tom Fitzpatrick, Senior Director of Channel Sales & Marketing at GlobalSCAPE
“We have a mix of mass market resellers, and regional and local VARs,” said Tom Fitzpatrick, Senior Director of Channel Sales & Marketing at GlobalSCAPE. “We also have some SIs and nationals like Presidio, Optiv and WWT, and Softchoice in Canada. What we are starting to see now is an increase in conversations with the traditional VAR channel. Our average sale per VAR is going up, which is good news.”
A key change in the channel program is the addition of a supplemental deal registration system designed to meet the needs of mass market resellers.
“We had deal registration before, where the partner put in the information, but the partner needed to provide a lot of the services and do the dirty work of the deal, such as doing a Proof-of-Concept, providing support, and driving that deal to closure,” Fitzpatrick said. “A lot of resellers could not do that, including the mass merchandising people, who told us that this disables them from participating fully in the program. So we added a second level of deal registration – Express Deal Registration. Under it, their only obligation is to find an opportunity and lob it over the fence. While they still get a generous margin, it’s not as much margin as those under the register deal registration, which remains in place.”
Mullen added that the change reflects the fact that GlobalSCAPE doesn’t make a simple product.
“It’s also a reflection of the complexity of the solution that they are selling,” he said. “It’s not a ‘plug in and you are done.’ It’s a complex product set. It takes a bit of effort for a partner to ramp up a fully self- sufficient technical and sales team.”
GlobalSCAPE has also significantly enhanced the enablement resources available to partners.
“We have had a couple of ‘Campaigns in a Box’ that we have been running on the direct side,” Fitzpatrick said. “We have now more than doubled the number of campaigns, and packaged them for the channel. We have also strengthened other enablement elements, such as conversation guides for resellers, case studies, and email campaigns.” GlobalSCAPE now also provides comprehensive instructions to help generate leads and visibility for the partner.
The video-based training has also been revamped to better cover the competitive advantages of EFT and Kenetix, as well as product features, market trends and selling techniques.
“The feedback from partners on our training was that it wasn’t bad, but that it could be improved,” Fitzpatrick noted. “The changes reflect that this is a complex sale, and we now have more integrated support, with the right training at the right pace and with the right sales tools. We hadn’t mapped all that together before.”
GlobalSCAPE uses Ingram Micro and Lifeboat for their commercial distribution, as well as two specialized distributors for their government business, which like their regular commercial business, is about half direct and half channel.
“Any partner looking to broaden their portfolio should look at us,” Fitzpatrick said. “The nature of what we are selling with data integration makes partners stickier with customers. It’s all about processes and workflows and involves in-depth conversations which can lead to services. It’s not taking a router out of a box.”
