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Subscription business management software company Ubersmith Thursday launched its first partner program with a goal of opening doors for technology, services and channel companies to build stronger relationships with their customers, expand their portfolios and boost margins.

To lead the global program, Ubersmith has hired Jeremy Chang as head of business development. He previously was chief operating officer at Fil Doux Textiles.

Ubersmith’s Jeremy Chang

Chang tells Channel Partners Ubersmith has had partners from the beginning and always saw value from and nurtured those relationships.

“With pay-for-what-you-use so prevalent now, the time is right for us to formalize and build on those existing relationships while investing the resources that it takes to properly support partners so that together we can grow and best serve our mutual customers,” he said. “The Ubersmith software suite of usage-based billing fits organizations of all sizes, is used by hundreds of companies around the world and integrates with merchant providers, electronic payment processing providers, cloud, virtualization, backup and other technologies and applications. Implementations can be customized to fit specific needs making Ubersmith an ideal way to transition into consumption-based billing.”

In the program, partners fall into three groups: technology, services and channel. Within each of those, there are three levels: Registered, Advanced and Premier. Partners will receive: sales and marketing support, including access to Ubersmith sales enablement resources; dedicated technical support; product education; exclusive product access; sales and marketing training; and access to its product and development organizations to influence future products.

“It’s aimed at a wide variety of different partner types with a focus on what we call technology, services and channel companies,” Chang said. “That builds on our successful partnerships with companies like Stripe and PayPal in payments, OnApp and SureTax in technology and Wipro and GlowTouch in services. We’re starting from zero in channel and see great opportunity there as well, because our product complements those skills and capabilities for delivering custom solutions.”

The program represents Ubersmith’s move to be more strategic about its partners and its move from a direct-focused sales model to a combined direct-partner model, he said.

“Based on our successful, informal partner relationships, we see great opportunity and are investing in our partner initiative where, for the first time, we’ll recognize reseller transactions,” Chang said. “Before we treated everyone as a customer even though we’ve worked with service providers from our inception and our software has both a view for our customers to access full client data such as billing status, discounts, along with a separate portal view accessed by their customers for only their specific account information. This is an obvious next step in our next phase of growth.”

OnApp, with 3,500 cloud provider customers globally, is among Ubersmith’s Technology partners.

“With its enterprise-grade billing and customer management capabilities, Ubersmith is a popular choice for telcos and MSPs who build their clouds with OnApp,” said Ditlev Bredahl, its CEO. “We’re looking forward to expanding our relationship with Ubersmith, and helping MSPs and telcos deliver the new subscription-based models that will drive their growth in cloud, CDN and other services.”