Increased demand for digital workspace solutions in the Work From Home era has led Cameyo to both launch a partner program and D&H to sign on to take it to their partners and their SMB customer base.
Robb Henshaw, Cameyo’s co-founder and CMO
Cameyo, which makes a cloud-native Digital Workspace platform, has launched their first channel program. The plan is to slowly expand the number of partners while expanding the percentage of channel business done at a faster clip. That task is likely to be made easier by one of their new partners, D&H Distributing, whose partnership is also being announced today.
Cameyo’s present cloud-native virtual application delivery platform is relatively new, launching at the beginning of 2019 after the company pivoted from making a packaging app product that they realized would be out of date in the age of digital transformation. Most of their business is direct, but the rise in demand for their kind of solution prompted Cameyo to introduce the new program to better enable partners.
“Where we started with this program was taking 12 active partners that we have today and help accelerate these existing partners’ business,” said Robb Henshaw, Cameyo’s co-founder and CMO. “We spoke with each of them. There’s now much higher demand for digital workspace solutions. That’s where we started – to put together a more formal program to give existing partners more firepower to meet greater demand.
“Since the first of the year, we have more than doubled our customer base, going from 96 customers pre-pandemic to 225 through August,” Henshaw continued. “In the last 30 days, we have built on that by signing 35 school districts.
“Back in March and April, it was common to think of remote work as a temporary thing, so organizations wanted to work with techs that they already had, like VPN and VDI,” he added. “Since then, there has been a shift to thinking that this will be a long term strategy they need to prepare for, and that even when people go back to the workplace they still need to have the tools and tech available to allow them to work from anywhere. So there has been a shift from the quick fix patches, and a much bigger driver now in this second phase of rolling out more permanent work solutions.”
The plan is to be conservative in the recruitment of new partners.
“We are still small, so the plan is to go from around 12 to 20 partners, although there’s no specific number,” Henshaw said. “We are expanding this in a very strategic manner because we aren’t yet a massive company.
“We need to grow smartly,” he stated. “Right now, about 30% of our revenue goes through the channel. By the end of the year, we are looking for a little under 40%. Halfway through next year, we expect the percentage to be in the mid 40s.”
This is Cameyo’s first channel program.
“Before, our approach to the channel was opportunistic, to find the best partner where we have a strategic need,” Henshaw said.
The program is a three tier one – Platinum Gold and Silver – with different annual revenue commitments. Platinum partners receive MDF, which are 3% of the previous quarter’s revenue. Gold partners can earn MDF, but need to bring in a certain amount of new customers per quarter to be eligible.
Platinum partner requires three sales and three technical people to be trained on Cameyo. With Gold partners, it’s two of each, and with Silver, it’s one.
“Our goal is to get to quarterly sales and technical training updates,” Henshaw said.
Henshaw also emphasized that Cameyo has rolled out customized partner portals for each partner.
“They give easy access to deal registration, content collateral, updated solution briefs, competitive battlecards, and case studies – all the most asked-for assets from a sales enablement perspective,” Henshaw indicated. “We have also built out a demo section customized for each organization.” These portals also have a marketing section with marketing materials, sales playbooks, and a style guide for partners, with a template for presentations to best present Cameyo.”
“This has all been built out in the last two months,” he said. “Every level of partners gets this customized, cobranded portal. Every time we make changes on the back end, they get automatic access.”
Cameyo also announced two new partners – Datacom in Australia and D&H Cloud Services in North America. D&H, which serves an SMB clientele, provides an opportunity to expand significantly downmarket.
“SMBs can rarely afford a VDI solution, except on a small scale,” Henshaw said. “They are very hard to do for the entire workforce and they are hard to manage. It can take 10 people for a VDI deployment, and SMBs can’t do that. So for enabling remote work, companies of less than a couple hundred have typically been left out of VDI and DaaS. Digital workspaces are more economical and simpler to manage. It’s cloud native, so we do all the server management. We are a very good fit for that market.”
Jason Bystrak, VP of the Cloud Business Unit at D&H, also sees Cameyo as a good fit for the small and medium business who all of their VAR and MSP partners serve.
Jason Bystrak, VP of the Cloud Business Unit at D&H
“Where we first heard about them was in a business review with our executive team and Google, to deploy software on Chromebooks, where we have a very strong business,” Bystrak said. We reached out to the CEO and had a discussion around leveraging partners’ skills around Azure and the ability to host Cameyo on the Azure platform.”
Bystrak indicated that D&H sees Cameyo as both an MSP and a VAR play.
“It has multitenancy, which is one of the holy grails of MSP tech, and it appeals to a lot of MSPs who are building their Azure practices, but we can sell it on a straight resell model as well,” he said.
Bystrak noted that D&H really doesn’t have anything in their portfolio that directly competes with this.
“We do carry other ways to deliver that remote experience, like our Nerdio partnership around Windows Virtual Desktop,” he said. “There are pros and cons for a full Windows Virtual Desktop deployment, but it is more expensive and complex, and Cameyo is simpler. It is ‘Windows Virtual Desktops Lite’ in some ways.”
D&H resellers run from companies who serve the medium part of the SMB market to micro-resellers selling to very small businesses, and Bystrak sees Cameyo as a fit for all of them.
“It goes across the base,” he said. “We focus very much on the smaller market, and we will provide them with training to get them rolling with this, but we also think it will appeal to larger D&H resellers.”
Bystrak indicated D&H sees Cameyo as a good play in response to the changes in workspace organization created by COVID.
“It’s certainly a catalyst which has seen people are going faster than they had planned in digital transformation, but we also see it as a long term play. A recent Gartner poll showed that 47% of companies will give employees the opportunity to work from home permanently, and 82% will offer the option to work from home part of the time.”
D&H will distribute Cameyo in both the U.S. and Canada.
