SaaSMax Gets Personal, Matching Partners, Vendors

Among the growing number of cloud marketplaces, SaaSMax has a unique twist: The company uses business intelligence to accelerate and identify the right SaaS partner and also makes partner-vendor introductions, boosting the success of both.

This is especially pertinent as things become more verticalized and technology becomes more line of business (LoB), and not just IT and cybersecurity. In fact, in June, SaaSMax won the 2017 Gartner Cool Vendor in SaaS with Innovative Business Models.

SaaSMax’s Dina Moskowitz

As software-as-a-service grows increasingly mainstream — it is still early in the game — savvy partners will align with cloud marketplace providers. But which one to choose, and how do you differentiate between the online storefronts popping up?

We chatted with Dina Moskowitz, founder and CEO of SaaSMax, the SaaSMax Marketplace and the PartnerOptimizer business intelligence solution, to learn more about the company.

Channel Partners: Give us a little history about SaaSMax and explain what differentiates SaaSMax from other cloud marketplaces.

Dina Moskowitz: SaaSMax is born in the cloud so we come from understanding the business model and the uniqueness of being a cloud-based as-a-service software company, ourselves.

Our beta platform went live in 2013 and that’s when our business model, as it is today, started evolving.

If you look at our catalog, it’s not like any other that you’re going to see in the traditional IT distributor cloud marketplaces or in some of the other cloud marketplaces that are out there. We’re bringing the software-as-a-service applications that are line of business — marketing, sales, accounting, ERP, all sorts of business intelligence applications — that would normally not be available in the traditional IT cloud distributor platforms to the channel.

There are thousands of SaaS applications and the people making decisions on buying software-as-a-service are in martech and fintech, and they’re doing business intelligence. The channel is shifting as to who the buyers are and the types of solutions and products that are available. We’re bringing that to the channel to make them realize that they have the opportunity to bring these to their customers, as well.

We’re giving SaaS companies the ability to leverage the channel that, in many cases, they didn’t even realize exists. A good portion of our channel partners are in telecom; they’re also in IT, they’re MSPs, VARs and all the traditional partners that we know about, but hosting providers as well Just last night we had a marketing agency sign up. We have Google adword and SEO experts who sign up; we have accountants and born-in-the-loud resellers signing up — even bloggers.

So we’re seeing how the channel is broadening to include the experts in domains as opposed to in IT.

CP: How many products are in the SaaSMax Marketplace and how many partners are you currently doing business with? Also, is the company national or global?

DM: We did an assessment a few weeks ago and we have …