TeamViewer has many customers, but hasn’t had much relevance for the channel in North America until this year, when they fundamentally reshaped their go-to-market approach to offer channel partners a solutions focus that the company thinks they will find attractive.
Finn Faldi, TeamViewer’s President Americas
Today, secure remote connectivity solution provider TeamViewer is releasing TeamViewer 14 Preview, with TeamViewer 14 Final scheduled for release on November 13. While multiple productivity improvements and feature enhancements are in the new version, the headliner is new Augmented Reality [AR] capabilities with TeamViewer Pilot. These are focused on greatly reducing truck rolls for OT focused businesses like HVAC, and provide for visual-focused support on a phone to a user who points their phone at a device.
TeamViewer is an 11 year-old company, whose head offices are in Göppingen, in southern Germany. They also have offices in the United States, Armenia, Australia, Japan and India. The company initially provided an offering for people connecting on laptops or desktop so they could help one another, and expanded from there to unattended kiosks and other IoT capabilities, as well as general offices.
“We have a massive reach across the globe, with 1.8 billion devices using our software,” said Finn Faldi, President Americas . “43 million customers a minute use our software, and we add 300-400k new downloads every day.”
The majority of these customers use TeamViewer’s free product.
“The product is very viral,” Faldi said. “As they grow their business, we have four levels of product, up to the highest level, TeamViewer Tensor, which is our product for big business.”
TeamViewer has over 545,000 paying customers, and the majority of them are lower in the market.
“We are the number one player in the small business market,” Faldi said. “SMBs and SMEs are our core focus, with the sub-50 seat business being our sweet spot. Many are businesses like a Pilates studio, or an individual attorney, who want to access their computer from home, and who use our software for connection and support. When they get more sophisticated in what they do, they move up to a more advanced product.”
TeamViewer has more recently introduced offerings for larger organizations.
“We are growing into being a major player for larger enterprises with our new Tensor product, and we have also added advanced products in IoT and augmented reality,” Faldi said. “Those are small today but are growing.”
“As we grow into the managed service space, we bring a solution-sell capability to channel partners, through our integrations with different ITSMs,” said John Reumann, TeamViewer’s Director of Partnerships. “It’s not just a point solution.”
Until this year, however, the channel was somewhat unstructured, and was, moreover, concentrated in international markets.
“It wasn’t until two years ago that we hired someone who started to look at our global business here, and in February 2018, we announced a formal channel program,” Faldi said. “In the U.S. though, the channel wasn’t a factor. To make it a factor, it meant reinventing the business to create real partnerships. John has done a great job of focusing on a few very large distributors, and since the middle part of this year, it has been a fast-growing part of the business.”
“We use Synnex and Lifeboat in the U.S. and Canada,” Reumann said. “We also work with the top DMRs like SHI, Insight and CDW Canada. We will also soon be working with cloud distributor Pax8.” The Pax8 relationship is scheduled to start in Q1 of 2019.
Pilot on the customer’s phone
The big news in TeamViewer 14 is the addition of new Augmented Reality [AR] capabilities with TeamViewer Pilot. Pilot allows TeamViewer customers to use their smart phone to point at equipment that isn’t working properly, and then get support over a secure connection from a second level expert in a call centre, using augmented reality and remote camera sharing.
“This is really aimed at operational technology providers – HVAC companies, plumbers, electricians and the like,” Faldi said. “It will greatly reduce the number of truck rolls, both to deal with OT devices in the home, and machinery in the field. A customer can use the software to point at the fusebox, and the support can show them visually on the phone what to touch, or move, or what button to release.”
TeamViewer 14 also ramps up performance, with smart adaptive compression that analyzes connection quality and automatically adjusts compression to improve speed in low-bandwidth environments. The server architecture has also been upgraded, for faster routing connections and increased remote connectivity stability.
Feature enhancements include new one-click remote script execution within sessions, as TeamViewer brings in a capability from the RMM world.
“We have also added a major UI change – “Dark Theme” – which allows filtering by the OS of the device, Mac, Linux or Windows, making it easier to do deployments,” said Aaron Boshers, support engineer at TeamViewer.
Finally, on the integrations front, new permissions from Apple allow final enforceable macOS session recordings for compliance purposes. Servicecamp, a TeamViewer service desk product, has also been extended into TeamViewer, to allow techs to create a ticket using it.
