OneNet launches application for resellers

Free software aims to maximise reseller profitability

By Vera Alves, Auckland | Monday, 17 October 2011
OneNet has teamed up with a group of students from the University of Auckland to develop a cloud-based application for resellers.

The students started working on the project in March and are now ready to hand over the code and documentation to OneNet so the application can be deployed and developed further.

The profit maximising software is the result of OneNet’s sponsorship of the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management Infosys 345 Business Project, a practical software development university paper.

This year, Auckland University students Michael Hoskins, Kyle Folster and Joshua Monteiro worked alongside a OneNet team to build a partner relationship management system designed to maximise profit and opportunities for OneNet resellers.

“Most [third-party accounting] systems are not providing business intelligence to resellers so that they understand our portfolio of appliances,” says OneNet managing director Michael Snowden. He says billing-as-a-service, in particular, is a problem and there are no applications off the shelf that address the issue.

The software has been built from the ground up to orient a company’s accounting system to maximise a client’s entire life-cycle profitability. New client acquisitions are tracked through their lifecycle with time-driven activity-based accounting, client-balanced scorecards with deeply embedded business intelligence that reveals variations in profit resulting from changes in prices, costs, volume and sales mix.

Snowden says the project is a win-win situation for both parties. While OneNet gets a new application built from the ground up, the students “have a foot in the real world”.

The software is entirely customisable and Snowden says it is “targeting those who are willing to try out new ideas”. Snowden explains that the focus has been on OneNet’s own cloud computing services, but the solution is more generally capable of supporting an “anything-as-a-service” business model.

The application will be available free of charge to OneNet resellers and, according to Snowden, it “is a by-product and a unique offer for resellers”.

Although the focus of the application is on OneNet’s reseller network, Snowden says the company will also look at marketing the software to other businesses.

The company had 15 resellers in March last year, 30 in March this year and the current number is sitting at about 70. “We put a lot of effort into our brand value. The objective is to have 90 percent of our revenue coming through resellers,” says Snowden. “At the moment, it is about 15 percent.”