The solution to automate partner channel revenue management launches today in the U.K., followed by EMEA, with Canada and the U.S slated to get CloudBlue Rev in early Q3.
Rajesh Marar, vice president and chief technology officer, cloud channel platform at CloudBlue
Today CloudBlue, the division of Ingram Micro that was created in 2018 to bring together and accelerate the distributor’s cloud platform and software development assets, is announcing the first stage of the launch of CloudBlue Rev. This technology, which came in last year’s acquisition of HarmonyPSA, and has been rebranded, is designed to ‘rev’ up partners’ channel revenue management, automating quoting, billing and reconciliation. The initial rollout is in the U.K., where HarmonyPSA is located, followed by adjacent EMEA markets. It is scheduled to become available in the U.S. and Canada in early Q3.
“HarmonyPSA is based in the U.K., and is not a big company,” said Rajesh Marar, vice president and chief technology officer, cloud channel platform at CloudBlue. “They had customers in the US and Canada, but the vast majority of their customers were in the U.K.”
There are lots of PSA tools in the market, but Marar said that CloudBlue Rev will have provide a differentiating experience because it builds business management tools that will save MSPs and increase their bottom line, directly into the PSA.
“It is targeted at an MSP audience,” Marar said. “Its basically a revenue management tool, whereas other PSA tools are more break-fix.”
Contract profitability tracking is the core of the system, enabling cloud MSPs to operate from quote to cash, including billing automation and reconciliation, within a single interface.
“It allows management of the entire quote to cash process,” Marar said. “That will save MSPs time and money. It is also effectively a black box that can help resellers who have still not made the move to managed services do so much more easily than before.”
Marar indicated that the HarmonyPSA product was well done, so that CloudBlue didn’t have to change a lot of things.
“Since the acquisition, we spent time integrating it within our ecosystem,” Marar said. “We used focus groups to make sure we could add value. We also worked on integrating vendor competency, competency mapping and vendor programs, including the use of pre-built templates. We spent a lot of time on this to provide the most specific automation possible for the Ingram ecosystem.”
Marar said that CloudBlue also spent a lot of time making sure that the onboarding experience was as seamless as it could possibly be.
“PSA tools typically have a long deployment cycle, which we want to avoid,” he noted.
Marar said that this desire to have a strong customer experience is also a factor in the staggered rollout of the offering.
“We are very focused on customer experience, which is why we spent a couple months on focus groups,” he said. “We really want the first impression in each market to be good, and want to make sure we address the needs of each market. As we roll out, we hope to get additional insights and improve the product.”
At the initial launch today, the solution incorporates more than 20 additional integrations with SaaS providers. More integrations are essential however, and Marar stressed that more integrations is the main improvement to the product that partners can look for early on.
“The more integrations we have, the more time it saves our partners,” he said. “Our first priority has been optimizing the solution for the Ingram ecosystem, but we understand the need to integrate with other ecosystems and other third party solutions and that is a key area that we will focus on.”
