Channels the strategy for MicroStrategy

Business Intelligence vendor, MicroStrategy, has flagged an improvement in its channel presence as it continues to grow its Australian business.

The vendor began its channel push at the beginning of the year, and has developed it to about 20 per cent of its overall business.

MicroStrategy vice president A/NZ, Patrick Elliott, said the goal was for 35 per cent of business to be channel driven.

“That is healthy for our industry,” he said. “We want to build a healthy ecosystem that is both geographical and vertical based, and avoid having a critical mass of partners – for instance in Queensland we’d be looking to form one good partnership, but Sydney and Melbourne could handle two partners.”

MicroStrategy’s biggest verticals were retail, banking and finance, Elliott said.

“If you’re running an organisation and looking to make decisions about cost cutting, you require good data – like the last period of economic uncertainty, business intelligence does well in a crisis,” he said.

MicroStrategy global vice-president, Asia-Pacific and channels, Shankar Ganapathy, said the vendor had set itself three key areas of focus for its channel business.

“How do we bring in new customers, scale revenue in a non-linear fashion, and build new relationships with customers?” Ganapathy said. “The Asia-Pacific business has become highly channel leveraged for us, and we’re making significant investments in this area.”

MicroStrategy offers partners sales support, with dedicated partner managers in the sales force, online partner resources and free sales training courses, which can be completed remotely or in person depending on the geography.

The vendor treats its partners as account managers, Ganapathy said, so training and competency in MicroStrategy solutions is mandatory.

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