ServiceNow rival eyeing up UK partners
Samanage will use recent $30m investment to grow global operations and its channel
IT service management vendor Samanage is gearing up for a UK channel assault and looking to steal marketshare from "legacy" rivals after bagging $30m (£23m) in funding, its CEO Doron Gordon has told CRN.
The US-based vendor's recent Series D funding round brings its total funding to $74m since coming out of stealth in 2014.
It will be used to grow its global operations. It currently has offices in the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Israel.
"We had no presence in the UK at the start of the year and now we have six employees and plan to grow that to 10 at the start of next year," Gordon told CRN.
"[We plan to invest] across the board and make investments in all the different functions of the company, in order to build new products and customer service."
Gordon added that though Salesforce is its primary partner globally, Samanage is looking to partner with local MSPs and systems integrators (SI).
"We have a lot of interest in scaling the business for indirect and channel-related strategies," he stated.
"It's really about VARs and MSPs; we already have a few dozen MSPs that are using our solutions to make their customers successful and we are looking to build that into a practice.
"[We want to] partner with some additional MSPs to get to their customer base - that is the primary strategy.
"We will also consider working with SIs and people who can really bring the solution to market and implement and deliver training and learning, primarily on the Salesforce platform."
Founded by Gordon in 2007, Samanage came out of stealth in 2014 and has 200 customers in the UK already, including Regus Yorkshire and Betfred.
Gordon listed ServiceNow and ZenDesk as its primary competitors, but he is confident that Samanage can grab some of the market share from those companies.
"If you think about the all the other solutions in the market most of them were created 20 to 25 years ago and are legacy products that no longer meet the modern needs of cloud-based solutions," he stated.
"The market opportunity is amazing and, given the size of it, Samanage has the product portfolio and ability to execute against that opportunity."