The SMAs and AvePoint - Meet the contenders

We speak to vendor AvePoint about their achievements in the last year and what it means to be nominated at SMAs 2023

Just over three weeks separate us from finding out the winners of this year's Sales and Marketing Awards 2023.

This year the ceremony will take place on Thursday 29 June at Leonardo Royal Hotel, Tower Bridge. And while we wait, we met some of the contenders to find out more about their journey.

Today, we speak to Tom Lin, chief revenue officer at AvePoint.

Lin currently has provided leadership and oversight at the company's London and Tokyo headquarters and recently served as AvePoint's chief customer officer and corporate vice president of sales.

He is a seasoned sales and operations professional who led the global enterprise, mid-market, SMB, and channel sales strategy.

In addition, Lin is the CEO of AvePoint EduTech, one of the first holistic SaaS learning experience platforms directly integrated into the Microsoft Cloud, and is a founding member of the AvePoint Talent Optimization and Management Program (ATOM).

CRN spoke to Lin to find out more about what the awards mean for AvePoint and their achievements in 2023.

Why do you think awards like the SMAs matter?

AvePoint are big advocates of CRN globally.

I believe the Sales and Marketing Awards are a great way for the industry to see what works well and who some of the unsung the stars of the channel are.

It's good to share some of our own wins and learn from others - maybe even some friendly co-competition with our competitors.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

For AvePoint, winning the best marketing campaign award would be a great honour, especially with our 100 per cent focus on channel in the UK.

It would also underline our commitment to working hand-in-hand with our successful UK partners such as Bytes - and show what we can do when we execute well together.

I hope it would also provide a springboard to inspire other partners to plan and execute even more creative and innovative campaigns with us.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

We've been working hard to launch ourselves into the UK channel, and the take up has been very encouraging.

It's made me really proud to be working with some of the very best industry experts in the UK, and how partners such as Bytes, Softcat, Ultima, Computacenter and many other valued partners see us as a channel-first team that adds significant value to their businesses.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2023 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

I always see opportunity in challenges.

Moving customers from the mindset of "just backup" into how to properly govern data in the cloud, and allowing users to collaborate with confidence in new ways of working isn't so much of a challenge as it is an opportunity.

Leveraging their close customer relationships, our partners are able to bring additional value and revenue streams from helping customers migrate to and manage data in the cloud.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

The shift had already begun prior to the last year, but we are seeing all our partners move even more into ‘trusted advisory' status with our mutual customers.

I don't see any specific changes the channel overall needs to make, but we're always listening to our partners to make us the best vendor to work with and go to market together as effectively as possible.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

We are seeing huge demand from our customers and prospects to as they look to effectively govern data in citizen development, low code/no code tools such as Power Platform as they continue to proliferate.

Power Platform adoption grew 72 per cent year-on-year last year, becoming a $2bn business for Microsoft in the process.

While the benefits of Power Platform might be clear, there are some red flags in terms of risk, governance and unchecked application proliferation, resulting in IT departments that are grappling with how to manage sprawl, compliance issues, and shadow IT.

AvePoint's full spectrum data governance platform enables our partners to help setup their customers for success as the look to modernise legacy applications, migrate them to the cloud, and streamline internal processes.