Untangle had been using a portal they built years ago, which used Google Drive for document sharing, but it scaled poorly as their partner base passed the 1000 mark, and as they acquired more partners outside North America.
Heather Paunet, SVP of Products and Marketing at Untangle
Small business-focused network security vendor Untangle is retiring its legacy channel portal, and has made a state of the art portal available to their channel partners. They expect it will greatly improve the ability of partners to work smoothly with Untangle, and improve the ability of partners to provide support to their customers.
“The new portal is one place where our partners will be able to go for everything,” said Heather Paunet, SVP of Products and Marketing at Untangle. “They now have one account with Untangle on the portal for all aspects of their business with us, from buying software to managing all aspects of their account. It’s one account for everything.”
Untangle now has over 1100 channel partners, which was a key reason the new portal was needed.
“We have a lot of partners that serve customers in those very small microbusiness type settings, of 2-3-5 users, but our sweet spot is the 25-100 user market,” Paunet noted.
Untangle’s legacy portal before was a homegrown design, and simply couldn’t scale to meet the demand more than a thousand partners placed on it.
“It worked up to a certain extent,” Paunet said. “We evolved it as we grew our partner business. For example, we used Google Drive for document sharing. But as the number of partners grew and grew, we needed better access and access privileges to provide support as we grew.”
While the growth of the partner base generally prompted the updating, Untangle’s expansion of their global partner base, and the difficulty of serving their needs with the homegrown system, became problematic.
“With the increasing number of partners we have who are globally dispersed, you would have more cases where content would be applicable to some partners, and not to others,” Paunet said. “A proper partner portal separates that – by language, and by access privilege. We were trying to manage that with the shared Google Drive privileges, and it just didn’t work.
Untangle didn’t have the capability to design a state of the art portal themselves.
“We build our own software, but it’s not that kind of software, so we partnered with [PRM provider] Allbound to build one,” Paunet indicated.
The new portal supports 15 languages, which addresses some of those global issues the company was experiencing. It provides information specific to each partner, whether VAR, MSP or distributor, around deal registration, sales collateral, playbooks, learning tracks, product information and the latest in Untangle news.
“It provides personalized experience based on what makes sense for them,” Paunet concluded.
