Australian serial channel man eyes EMEA domination

Channel renewals vendor unveils European expansion plans

The latest venture of a serial channel entrepreneur from Australia is eyeing EMEA expansion, claiming its platform can help companies both reduce costs and make money at the same time.

Iasset was spun off from Australian distie Distribution Central (DC) in 2008 and has since been growing in its homeland and the wider APAC market. In the summer it launched in EMEA and today it set out its expansion plans for the UK and EMEA channel.

The firm - and its parent DC - was set up by Scott Frew, an Australian channel bigwig behind a number of channel firms in the country including LAN Systems, which was sold to Westcon Australia in 2000.

Iasset is a renewals platform which helps companies know when IT contracts need to be updated. It comes in the form of a cloud application and tracks a product's journey throughout the channel so that each tier - vendor, distributor and reseller - can keeps tabs on it.

"Most resellers, distributors and some manufacturers use Excel spreadsheets to try and track who is on what and where they are," Frew told CRN.

"What iasset does, it is a cloud app, and it tracks the vendor, the distributor, the reseller, the end customer, the site information if it is loaded up, the serial numbers, the software loads, the contracts, the contract expiration."

He said the platform handles a range of different product types: hardware products with maintenance; large-scale software transactions; and cloud consumption.

"To me, it is all free money sitting out there, it is just no one is tracking it," he said.

At the moment, iasset has two staff running its EMEA operations from London. The company is targeting vendors, disties and resellers in the region to become customers. Resellers can also licence out the product to their own customers.

"There isn't really a channel programme in the true sense of the word, but what some of the resellers have done in the US and APAC is they have implemented an iasset instance on behalf of a customer," he said.

"So, there is a very big health organisation in Australia [for example]. The reseller runs their own iasset to run their general base but then they have one sitting there running this health organistaion. They go to them and say ‘don't worry about renewals and assets, we will do it for you at a charge'."

He said the iasset product makes resellers "incredibly efficient" and is a win-win when it comes to making money.

"This engine is the first thing where we will make more money for you while reducing your cost base, rather than targeting one or the other," he said.

"Our largest competition is really a telemarketing operations pestering for renewals, but that doesn't scale. My fundamental belief is the vendors are already, through discounts, paying them [the channel] to do the job.

"Why would they pay extra money [for telemarketers] to chase the distributor, reseller and end user? It is just not a scalable model. In our model, we're providing the tool that connects those together."