Nerdio’s focus is on their Nerdio for Azure offering, which led them to work with cloud and Microsoft- focused SherWeb.
Vadim Vladimirskiy, Nerdio’s CEO
IT-as-a-Service software provider Nerdio, which released Nerdio for Azure as their flagship offering early in 2017, has announced their first distribution agreement, with Canadian cloud service giant SherWeb. While SherWeb has a global reach, to over 100 countries worldwide, their core base is in Canada and the U.S., and that is the focus of Nerdio’s interest at this point.
Nerdio has actually been around for a while, as a brand of Adar, which started as an MSP in 2005, with an exclusive focus on hosted virtual desktop services, first with terminal services, then RDS, then VDI with VMware View. Their offering was productized as a platform for use by other MSPs at the beginning of 2016, and the Nerdio brand was implemented at that time. They then decided to provide an offering which brought this capability to the public cloud, so they took the same model from the VMware stack, designed it specifically for Microsoft Azure, and brought it to market a year ago.
SherWeb, whose head offices are in Sherbrooke, Quebec and which was founded in 1998, has a strong Microsoft practice and has received multiple awards from them, including a past World Hosting Partner of the Year, and most recently, Microsoft Canada’s SMB Partner of the Year. That caught the eye of Nerdio early on. Last November, they both exhibited and presented at SherWeb’s Accelerate 2017 Cloud Summit in Toronto, when they were in the process of developing the relationship with SherWeb that has now been finalized.
“We focused on them early on because of that focus they have on Cloud,” said Vadim Vladimirskiy, Nerdio’s CEO. “Compared to some of the traditional distributors, they have a very mature and established model, and have been selling Microsoft subscriptions for quite some time. We think that the traditional distributors have had large businesses around very established business models for a very long time, and that Cloud is something that they have been dragged into. With SherWeb, on the other hand, Cloud is their preferred type of distribution model.”
Vladimirskiy was also impressed by the extent of support that SherWeb provides to channel partners.
“I also talked with a lot of other distributors, and I found that some of the technical and sales support that they provide to partners is unique in industry,” he said. “A lot of this weight would otherwise fall on us. They handle it themselves, and only escalate to ISVs when it is needed.”
Vladimiskiy said that Nerdio also spent time assessing the type of partners that SherWeb has, who number around 7000 worldwide,
“They have a lot of reseller partners, and their reseller profile fits very well into the Azure IT-as-a-Service business model,” he said. “One reason that we went to their Cloud Summit was that we wanted to talk with as many of their resellers as possible, and validate our assumptions. We found that they are definitely the right fit for our product.”
The relationship with SherWeb is a global one, but Vladimirskiy indicated that North America was the major focus of the deal.
“For us, their presence in Canada and the U.S. are at the forefront,” he said. “Most of their resellers are in North America, and that’s what’s really important for us today.”
Vladimirskiy also noted that the SherWeb deal won’t be followed by a rush of other distribution agreements.
“We have a very select view on distribution,” he said. “It is a lot of work to strike the deal and support the relationship from a pre-sales and post-sales perspective. This is the first one where we have finalized the agreement. We are in discussions with a couple of others. But it’s a very select strategy. We aren’t going to have multiple distribution strategies because we wouldn’t be able to support them properly.”
