This vendor of application performance management (APM) and transaction management solutions, wants to increase its indirect channel sales by at least 30 per cent this year, and it’s looking to Canadian partners for help.
Nastel Technologies is a privately-held company headquartered in Melville, N.Y. that specializes in aiding global 2000-sized companies with their performance of application management and monitoring needs. Charley Rich, vice-president of product management and marketing at Nastel, said the company’s current go-to-market strategy is primarily direct. However, he added this will soon change.
“We’re evolving our go-to-market strategy in 2010 to add on more resellers and VARs (value-added resellers),” Rich said. “Right now, we do between 80-85 per cent of our sales direct, but we’d like to increase this so it would be a 50-50 ratio.”
The company has various partnerships around the world and in specific countries, including a global business partnership with IBM and a reseller partnership with Toronto’s Softworx Technology Group. Nastel Technologies’ sales efforts go by vertical markets and include industries such as financial services, healthcare and insurance.
“We’re very interested in working with channel partners who are specifically focused on verticals like insurance, healthcare, government and high-end retail,” Rich said. “Toronto and Montreal are two areas where we’d like to grow more in this year.”
While the company wants to ramp up its current partner base, Rich said there are some challenges.
“The challenge right now is to find partners that have skills, for example in APM, J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) and .Net, and who aren’t already carrying our competitors’ (products),” Rich said. “We’re spending a lot of our money on e-mail marketing, campaigns, Webinars and we also participate in some trade shows.”
The company’s flagship product is its AutoPilot suite of products, which Rich said provides users with a complete, end-to-end solution for better visibility, predictability and performance of business applications. The solution helps users monitor and manage their transaction flows, such as processing and ordering, their application performance, and messaging middleware, all in real-time. This is helpful because if something goes wrong and the customer wants to know where an order is, the company has visibility to give their customer an answer.
AutoPilot also has what Nastel Technologies calls its Complex Event Processing engine, which scans for patterns across large volumes of data to determine whether they’re either business “normal” or business “abnormal,” he said. This built-in engine also helps customers save on costs by helping to minimize the risk of any negative customer impact, before it actually happens.