Exeed adds Salesforce to new SaaS offering

Distie launches Mycloudstore web portal with small businesses in mind

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Monday, 12 December 2011
Exeed has launched its Mycloudstore portal, an internet platform designed to help resellers offer cloud services to customers with 20 or fewer employees.

The distributor until recently had been known for selling HP ranges with complementary hardware from vendors such as Watchguard and Netgear.

The portal, Mycloudstore.co.nz, includes SaaS applications from nine vendors, including CRM application provider Salesforce.com, which tapped Exeed in early December to be its first distributor in this country. Exeed intends that Mycloudstore will provide any application that a SMB would require to do business in New Zealand, leveraging the reseller’s position as the trusted advisor of its clients.

“It’s basic, logical and simple,” says Justin Tye, Exeed’s managing director. “All we’ve done is provided a mechanism for resellers to make that recommendation and reward them for it if it should turn into a sale.”

In addition to Salesforce, the portal includes applications from mostly New Zealand-based vendors, such as its inaugural brand, email security provider SMX, and accounting solutions vendor Xero. The remaining vendors are WorkflowMax, point-of-sale provider iBUS, backup vendor Unleashed, inventory management company Vend and MDM providers AirWatch.

Exeed sees the portal as an addition to its networking hardware business, but the genesis of Mycloudstore arose as vendors started rolling out IaaS solutions, signalling an inevitable migration of products off customers’ premises and into the cloud.

“It was about 18 months ago when Microsoft, HP, IBM and VMware were all starting to push various iterations of infrastructure consolidation, where datacentres were taking over from the on-premise activity of organisations and taking the hardware off site as well,” Tye says.

“It struck us that the money to be made on that would be from application virtualisation and if you have invested infrastructure, then populating those racks. We wanted to be the face of the transaction, rather than the back end of it and we had a meeting with Xero and that was the catalyst for where we are now.”

Xero’s existing channel, according to Tye, was motivated by professional fees for providing customers accounting services rather than from selling technology. Xero saw the portal as a new channel and helped bring some of the other application vendors on board, Tye says.

Exeed as of this writing is hiring a manager and sales specialist for Mycloudstore. Vendors, meanwhile, have been training Exeed’s existing staff of 14 sales people in the various products. The distributor, based in Parnell, Auckland, is planning to run a roadshow early next year to allow the vendors to speak directly with Exeed’s 2000-strong reseller customers.

“Enabling the channel to know what application to recommend and how to sell it is our job,” Tye says.

There are also plans to extend Mycloudstore to Australia once the portal is tested, and to image the portal on hardware as a potential sales lead.

Through the portal, customers purchase the applications, identifying their reseller, who is then registered for the sale.

Tye recognises there is a risk that customers would purchase the service directly, but says that many of the application vendors do not have budget for direct marketing, and that customers rely on resellers to recommend services.