Azul will look to push up to 40 per cent more of its business through the channel regionally, as it consolidates its presence and implements a revamped partner program.
Chief executive Scott Sellers, in Australia this week, told CRN that the company, which makes a Java platform, had relaunched its global partner program at the start of this year.
Sellers said that Asia Pacific currently represents “about 15 per cent” of Azul’s “total business”. It has regional headquarters in Singapore, and a presence throughout the region.
“A lot of the transactional aspect of our business is done through partners, moreso in APAC than the US and to some degree more than in Europe as well,” Sellers said.
“For a number of years we’ve had, I’d call it, loose partnerships with some of the value-added resellers and the distributors.
“We brought on a global VP of partner and channel last [US] autumn and we relaunched our channel program in January, what we call PartnerConnect, and as a result of that we’ve already seen a significant amount of additional leads coming from the channel partners.”
Sellers said some of the specific work put into PartnerConnect was around “eliminating” channel conflict, given Azul still conducts some enterprise business directly, although it has intentions to slim that amount down.
He said the work ensured “each partner has its own set of customers or own set of opportunities they can pursue.”
Sellers also said the partner portal had been revamped, particularly to make deal registration easier, and that more enablement and education was being provided.
“Ultimately, whereas today probably less than half of our APAC business goes through channels, we expect as time goes on, we want to see more like 80 or 90 per cent of our business going through channels,” Sellers said.
He suggested Azul had a strong inbound pipeline of leads, in part because one of its main offerings is an alternative runtime to Oracle Java, which is getting more expensive to licence in certain configurations.
In Australia, Sellers said Azul did “the most business” through two partners - SoftwareOne and Insight Australia, both of which also had a regional presence, though he added there were also “a number of other partners” beyond these two.
Sellers said that Azul “wants to continue to expand”, but would be selective about onboarding new partners.
“We certainly need breadth but really for us it’s the quality over quantity argument,” he said.
“It’s important that we really develop the momentum with a smaller group of partners because it does take real time, attention and relationship-building to make a partner successful.”
Azul gave NEXTGEN the distribution rights for Australia and New Zealand in November last year.
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