Level Platforms on the prowl for VAR partners
Software vendor sets its sights on signing between 500 and 1,500 UK channel partners
Remote monitoring software vendor Level Platforms is scouring the UK market to recruit a “significant” number of resellers.
The vendor, whose flagship Managed Workplace product is aimed at the SME market, said it eventually hoped to recruit between 500 and 1,500 partners in the UK. Speaking to CRN, Greg Henderson, director of international business development, said the vendor has about 30 partners in the UK currently.
“We are looking for significantly more than this,” he said. “The UK SME sector has 2.3 million companies within it and if we consider our 30 resellers are monitoring 20 or 30 end-users each, we are far from saturation. We are looking for VARs that already offer services to the SME market.”
Henderson said eventually the vendor would also like to sign one or two distributors. “We already have an agreement in the US with Ingram Micro, which actually offers our product as a hosted managed service to its VARs,” he added. “We hope the UK would be interested too.”
One way it is hoping to attract VARs is through its association and as a founder member of MSP Partners, an alliance between vendors to encourage and help VARs to become Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
“Once VARs are monitoring 20 or 30 companies, they can then offer add-on sales, such as routers or memory and then they can offer the whole thing as a managed service,” he said.
Tony Lock, programme director at research firm, Freeform Dynamics, said the strategy was feasible, as long as Level Platforms identifies the right partners. “It will need channel partners that have the skills, infrastructure, desire and business models to exploit the technology,” he said. “Managed services is an area that is growing rapidly, but not everyone can do it. Equally, customers will only want to buy managed services that offer them value.”