Software vendors look for increased channel touch

Expanding channel touch through new partnerships and geographic reach was a key theme for several software vendors over the past week.

US-headquartered performance management vendor, myDials, is seeking to recruit more resellers as it looks at growing a stronger indirect business. During a visit to Australia, its CEO, Wayne Morris, told ARN it had initially focused on dealing with customers directly.

“On a worldwide basis, it’s 40 per cent direct, and 60 per cent indirect, in Australia, so it’s more slanted towards indirect,” he said. The company set-up a presence in Perth and Brisbane a year ago. Asia-Pacifi c sales and marketing manager, Jeremy Bolton, said he wanted to increase the company’s presence in Sydney and Melbourne and was searching for partners that dabbled in consulting or outsourcing and had a business focus.

Markets myDials plays into include manufacturing and healthcare. Morris added the company was also seeing some traction in government. The company is looking to hire more staff to pump up its development resources and has up to 10 partners in Australia.

Web application development outfi t, Elcom, is also planning to grow its channel model as its seeks to increase indirect business and take advantage of the rise in Web 2.0 technology take-up.

CEO, John Anstey, said one of the best ways to expand the reach of its web applications was through the channel. About 20 per cent of Elcom’s business is indirect.

“We’re actively recruiting partners,” he said. “We’re also talking to some service applications vendors because web applications have a logical fi t with some of the fi nancial applications that are currently deployed and they need a respectable web interface.”

Elcom has 15 partners in Australia including include Regal IT. Anstey said he would like to increase that four fold in the next 18 months.

At a recent security seminar, hosted by Elcom and Regal IT, a survey was conducted that revealed 92 per cent of respondents allowed employees to access Web 2.0 applications including social networking, blogs and wikis, and only 71 per cent considered the technology used to access these services as security threats. Despite this, 47 per cent of companies were not increasing spend on security despite the perceived threat.

“Generally, organisations are allowing their people to use Web 2.0 applications, and they did raise a point that they’re concerned about security,” Anstey said. “Social networking was the most popular of the Web 2.0 applications.”

In a statement, Regal IT managing director, Mark Gluckman, said the biggest security risk companies faced was their own IT staff.

“Companies need to decide what data is important and ensure this is protected from theft and any sort of unauthorised changes. These technologies are available, at a price, and companies will need to consider the balance between the value of their data, value of its loss to the company, and the cost of protecting it,” he said.

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