Lessons from the Field – How Apptix is Leading the Way in Channel Partnerships

[This guest blog by Aubrey Smoot, Apptix Vice President of Business Development, originally appeared on BeanSprout - an organization that aims to connect businesses together so that they can create meaningful partnerships to grow and enhance their business.]


We attended the Parallels Summit in Orlando recently, where we met the fine folks at BeanSprout and got into a long, philosophical discussion about the need to truly understand the business model of your channel before you can successfully build your brand within it. Based on our Parallels presentation, I’d like to take this opportunity to share some of what we’ve learned as we’ve built the Apptix partner program over the past few years.

To Build Your Channel, You Must Understand the Channel Itself

That sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? What I mean is that you need to know up front what kinds of partners are in your channel, what they want, how they want to do it, and how much visibility and functionality they want.

• Size. Channels range from boutique IT services organizations to giant telcos and mega-corporations.


• Ability. Business models range from providers that need help supporting the accounts receivable process to API-level integration between the partner’s existing billing systems and the service provider’s provisioning.


• Geography. Geography ranges from local to international.


• Visibility. Service providers can be fully visible to end users, behind a private label option where the customer never knows a different service provider is involved, or anywhere in between.

Apptix partners runs the gamut, from small regional resellers harnessing the Apptix brand name to multi-national companies offering Apptix services through an entirely private-labeled offering with no brand recognition.

Have a Strategy for Each Type of Channel Partner

Once you know as much as possible about the market, you need be sure you have a strategy for how you’re going to handle each business model represented within the channel.

This pyramid image is a helpful guide for how we see the channel, and the opportunities that go with it.

Let’s start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up to the larger enterprise-class organizations.

• Referrals. You may have many small, diverse organizations providing referral sales. These organizations need the service provider to maintain the necessary technological infrastructure and to provide support. While these are your largest opportunity in terms of sheer numbers, you must strike a balance that ensures your services are helpful to the client while the relationship remains profitable for you.


• Smaller Resellers. These may be small IT services companies that want to add your products to their existing portfolios. They want to use the larger, more established service provider’s name to add credibility to their new offerings, but do not have the staff to handle things like monthly recurring payments.


• Larger Resellers. These companies are more established and already provide an array of IT services. They have the infrastructure to handle almost everything and want to maintain their own brand and identity, adding your services to their portfolios while still being able to provide the customer a single, unified bill. Most of these larger resellers will opt for a private-label solution, where the service provider is behind the scenes but still provides technical and marketing support.


• Enterprise-class Private Label Partners. These are world-class organizations that can bring high volume or large deals. They want to provide services that complement their core offerings or value-added services without the customer realizing another service provider is at work. Technical APIs let customers purchase and provision services directly through the partner’s shopping cart, accounts are managed through their customized control panel, and the partner provides direct customer support backed by the service provider’s technical staff when necessary.

Streamline Your Processes, Maintain Your Margins

Here at Apptix, we have specific partner programs for each type and cater to their needs in ways that are still beneficial to our own bottom line. One of the keys for us has been to standardize onto a central platform for all provisioning, control, reporting, and management needs. By doing that, we have been able to bring products from multiple suppliers into a single, easy-to-use platform that helps support multiple business models. It also allows us the flexibility to add services as necessary to keep up with market demands and the demands of our partners and their clients.

This single platform allows us the economies of scale to be competitive in an industry that is very price sensitive. We have a fiscal responsibility to our suppliers to account for their services, and to our shareholders to provide efficient, cost-effective solutions.

Apptix is always looking for new partners. We are the premier provider of hosted business communication services for organizations of all sizes, with particular expertise serving legal, financial, and health care firms. Our extensive product portfolio includes integrated solutions (e.g. Unified Communications) and point solutions including Microsoft Exchange, VoIP, SharePoint, Web Conferencing, and Secure IM with Presence. We deliver our services over a highly reliable network that leverages best-in-class technology, is housed in SAS 70-compliant data centers, and is backed by U.S.-based 24/7 support.

Apptix lets partners expand customer offerings and add new recurring revenue streams. Channel partners turn to us for our industry-leading on-boarding and migration expertise, award-winning support, robust margins, white-label offerings, and digital marketing assets. The entire partner experience is extremely flexible and customizable, with options for Apptix to handle internal and external support, billing, accounts receivable, and provisioning.

Want to join us? Visit our BeanSprout profile or our partner website.