As Res Software prepares to celebrate its one-year anniversary in the Americas its Americas president, Jim Kirby, is looking to expand its channel partnerships on both sides of the border.
The workspace management vendor is based in Amsterdam but opened an Americas headquarters in Philadelphia earlier this year. The company, which uses a 100 per cent channel-only sales model, currently has 15 partners in the US and one in Canada.
With its distribution agreement with Arrow ECS this summer, Kirby said the company is looking forward to establishing a “strong North American presence with their VAR community. Now, the company’s looking to sign up partners in the right geographies, he added.
“In Canada, we work with Long View Systems,” Kirby said. “I’d like to have one solid platinum and gold partner in Canada because when we find them, we’ll invest in them with marketing programs, engaging with our sales people and doing joint events with them. It would be ideal if a partner has a presence on both coasts, but it’s not necessary.”
In the US, Kirby said he’s looking to have coverage across the country and the goal is to have “many” silver-level partners across the continent.
Jeff Fisher, vice-president of Res Software’s business development strategy, joined the company this year and is responsible for the company’s global alliances with larger ISVs in the desktop virtualization space with Microsoft, Citrix and VMware. His role also has him working with other SI partners to gain traction and strategic positioning in the market place.
The company also re-branded its PowerFuse and Wisdom software solutions earlier this year to make it easier for customers to understand. PowerFuse is now known as Workspace Manager and Wisdom is now known as Automation Manager.
Workspace Manager allows users to personalize and secure their workspace environments and Automation Manager is designed for use in Microsoft Windows workstation and server environments and enables administration, maintenance, provisioning, automation and integration capabilities.
“We wanted to get some more functional naming to express what the products actually did so customers would understand them better,” Kirby said. “We also did repackaging using a modular product strategy so it’s easier for partners to price and sell.”
In January Kirby, said the company will launch its Virtual Desktop Extender product, which partners will be able to make about 20 points of margin on.
“This is a new point product,” Kirby said. “While the technology’s been bundled with Workspace Manager for many years, this separate solution will now allow local applications that run on rich Windows endpoints to be seamlessly integrated into a remote virtual desktop session. This allows partners to bring a mixed environment together now because the extender will work with Citrix, Microsoft and VMware technologies.”
Going forward, Kirby said the SMB and SME markets will be a “big play” for the company’s North American sales strategy. Kirby said the company will also look to bring on SI (systems integrator) partners to also help in the large enterprise.
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.