‘7 Minutes’ With Liquidware President and COO Chris Akerberg

… larger and more proactive partners that actively work with us to grow their business with joint GTM plans.

Our channel program also includes a very competitive deal-registration program as well as a highly flexible MDF program, via which we commit funds to partner initiatives to introduce customers to – and educate them upon – our solutions.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

CA: Nearly 100 percent of sales go through the channel. Approximately 250-300 Accler8 and Premier partners globally. Our average margin is 20-30 percent.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

CA: Only Citrix and VMware come close to matching the complete functionality of the totality of our solutions. That said, we don’t only compete with them, but in certain instances are able to comfortably co-exist with them.

Of course Citrix and VMware are platform vendors that have many priorities that go well beyond our key offerings of user-environment management, application layering, and end-user monitoring. Nevertheless, we benefit from their efforts to educate customers on the need for solutions like ours, because in many cases these customers are looking for deeper functionality and/or an agnostic solution for greater coverage and flexibility to meet their needs, which only our solution provides.

There are also other “point” solution companies, which provide one of our three solutions, and from a technical perspective we typically stack up very well against these firms, solution to solution. However, when clients learn our wider story, we invariably win over them over from a broader, strategic point of view.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

CA: The functionality of our solutions will make them relevant and required for many years to come. We therefore don’t anticipate any major changes to this technology but rather to the manner in which it is consumed. That is to say our biggest change will be our increasing evolution to cloud and SaaS-based models.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

CA: Our strategy will continue to be that of remaining focused on the EUC partners that are also adapting to the changing, more cloud-focused market, and to building programs that help them accelerate their own and their customers’ growth to the cloud.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

CA: Our program delivers to partners a peerless “trifecta” of benefits, by giving them:

1. A way to differentiate their company from the competition;
2. Solutions that not only enable them to have repeatable service offerings, but also lower their internal costs, thus creating higher margins for their services; and
3. Great margins and protection on our license sales, as evidenced by the ability of our partners to typically double their profit on their VMware or Citrix sale when adding Liquidware to the deal.