SaaSMax Gets Personal, Matching Partners, Vendors

… members of SaaSMax, vendors and resellers, from about 85 countries. It’s mostly the partner side that makes it that wide, because solution providers around the world are looking for new and innovative products. On the other side, there are vendors looking to get into the U.S. market.

We have over 200 applications in our marketplace today and our pipeline is changing weekly. On the reseller side we have over 2,000 registered.

CP: How does SaaSMax enable partners?

SM: We’re online and the listings are there, but we’re very proactively making introductions and talking with our partners to understand their businesses and make introductions and recommendations to get them on the right product.

We have SaaS channel strategists. So when a partner signs up on SaaSMax — and there’s no charge for a partner to sign up — we reach out and schedule a time to talk to them about what we offer. Really, it’s more to learn about their business and make sure we run by them the different solutions that we think would be right for them.

We set up a meeting and it turns into the right product or several products, and the vendor and partner begin to do business. Our goal is to create successful matches.

We also give them tools. Those will be evolving over the next few months; we will also soon be rolling out our next-generation platform that will allow each reseller to have their own SaaS store and more.

With the next-generation platform, which we call our reseller commerce platform, won’t force the vendors to accommodate and invest technical resources to fit into what we’re doing. Instead, the platform will accommodate any type of pricing structure and any type of reseller program.

So, we’re accommodating them and can basically take on any type of SaaS business model and any type of reseller program, whether it’s a commission off the retail price, a wholesale structure, a white label and resell, or just an online digital affiliate referral. We can accommodate all of those.

CP: How is SaaSMax reaching out to partners?

DM: We have the support of mainstream industry analysts — the Gartner award, for example — so the industry is paying attention and that’s driving new business to us. We also do a lot of outreach to solution providers in the traditional IT channel; we recognize that they will be included among our partners of the future, along with the broader channel I mentioned earlier.

So, we’ll be at ChannelCon; I’m on the CompTIA Business Applications Advisory Council, and they give us a lot of opportunity to bring our thought leadership and our view of the future to the channel — and we’re seeing shifts in what we’re doing.

Online we use social media and because there’s a need for SaaS, we’re seeing …