Reseller software alliance goes on recruitment drive

Business software reseller association, the Consulting Alliance, is on a recruitment drive to sign up members across the country.

The group has appointed association manager, Roland Maynard, to help coordinate marketing activities and promote awareness of the group. He has spent decades in the IT industry and assisted various start-ups with building out their sales presence.

The Consulting Alliance, or Consal, was established by a band of former Attache software resellers in 2000 and focuses on promoting local business software resellers to SMBs. To do this, the not-for profit organisation runs its own customer-focused roadshow, The Business and Accounting Software Expo, in Australian capital cities twice a year. It also runs an annual conference for members.

Resellers who sign up need to agreed to a code of conduct and are divided into two categories - Corporate and Individual. Software packages members focus on include SAP Business One, MYOB, QuickBooks, Attache and Arrow.

President, co-founder and former Attache software reseller, John Ireland, said the group had a dozen active members representing 80 consultants. It is now looking to more than double its membership numbers to 30-40 in the next 12 months to ensure national coverage.

"The aim of Consulting Alliance was to promote our own businesses collectively - you can do better than individually," he said.

Existing members include Queensland-based ProSys Consulting, Acacia Consulting Services in Victoria, CA Management Services in WA and Computer Research and Technology in Dubbo, NSW.

"We want to represent the major vendor players equally - for example, we would like to have SAP resellers in every capital city," Ireland said. "Most clients have interstate branches, this means we could assist them with local services providers, which is an important selling point."

Ireland said he'd like to get to the stage where Consal was similar to the Certified Practicing Accountants (CPA) association.

"We're looking to lift the bar in terms of the standards people can expect from our consultants," he said.