Cloud services vendor BitTitan of Kirkland, Wash., has unveiled a OneDrive extension for its Office 365 Starter Kit product.
OneDrive is arguably the top Office 365 workload that a channel partner needs to pay attention too. Why? Well Rocco Seyboth, the vice president of marketing for BitTitan believes the vast majority are already doing email, but now need to unlock a second workload to increase profitability.
If they are able to offer that second workload it could mean more profits for solution providers with an Office 365 business practice who target the SMB. Seyboth told CDN that Microsoft has changed the requirements inside the FastTrack program that make it necessary for solution providers to now focus on a secondary workload for customers.
Rocco Seyboth
“OneDrive is the best way for partners to unlock FastTrack funds. In the past you could sell Exchange Online and get some nice revenue for Office 365 along with migration of email. That’s not the case anymore. To get access to FastTrack funds from Microsoft you need to sell one other workload to qualify,” he said.
With OneDrive it also enacts active usage several times throughout the day and that too unlocks FastTrack funds.
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The new BitTitan OneDrive extension also educates solution providers on what workloads OneDrive is ideal for. Seyboth said that it first looks at file share because almost every customer has this. “As you grow from a one person company to a five to 10 employee company you get a network for file sharing and folders. We encourage partners to go to that file share first with OneDrive,” he added.
File share drives more active usage which in turn adds more dollars to a partner’s revenue stream from the Microsoft FastTrack program. It also supports migrations for SharePoint, Google Drive, DropBox and Box.
“Microsoft has also done a great job of integrating OneDrive in the email experience so it can now go hand-and-hand, while other experiences with Google don’t integrate so well,” he said.
The OneDrive extension includes new sales scripts for BitTitan’s Sales Automation tool.
BitTitan gets disruptive
Seyboth also told CDN that all migrations to Microsoft SharePoint Online are now free for BitTitan channel partners. This new development is part of the company’s strategy to be more complimentary with migrations to SharePoint Online through its MigrationWiz product.
“We are giving this to the partners for free so they can sell a third workload and keep 100 per cent of the proceeds for themselves. We think this is going to be disruptive in the market as there are a few vendors who offer SharePoint migration as their primary or only business (Sharegate and Metalogix),” Seyboth said.