CompTIA has launched a council designed to help nontraditional channel partners sell business applications.

The IT industry organization named multiple members that will headline the CompTIA Business Applications Advisory Council, which aims to “build an ecosystem of SaaS vendors and partners.”

CompTIA created the panel because many up-and-coming partners selling SaaS are challenging the traditional reseller approach.

“Companies represented on the council come from the ‘as a service’ world, with applications and solutions delivered via the cloud and sold to customers as subscriptions,” said Annette Taber, CompTIA’s vice president of industry outreach. “But while their route to market may differ from traditional channel companies, we believe there are many opportunities for the two to coexist and cooperate. Our goal is to identify opportunities for collaboration and create the tools to make it possible.”

Marc Monday, who serves as vice president of global business development for Concur, and is a co-chair on the council, says channel partners need to be more agile than ever.{ad}

“As the IT market shifts to the cloud, it’s important to continue to grow and strengthen the traditional IT partner community, whilst embracing the changes in the marketplace,” Monday said. “Partners and vendors alike need to evolve to address the blurring of lines between IT, operations, finance and other functional departments that rely on and increasingly self-manage SaaS apps and cloud services.”

Sunir Shah, co-founder of the Small Business Web, is the council’s co-chair. He says he looks forward to addressing business models, market relationships and regulatory concerns.

Other members of the council work with ConnectWise, Compliancy Group, Insperity, Rev.io, Autotask, SaaSMax and Channel Mechanics. Interested companies can read more about the council.

CompTIA also is expected to roll out an association for IT professionals in May.