Hosting company Tenzing Managed IT Services has partnered with Apprenda, a cloud middleware company, to help independent software vendors (ISVs) speed their software-as-a-service (SaaS) model migrations and deployment.
Raj Atwal, vice-president of engineering and partner development at Toronto-based Tenzing, said the partnership with Apprenda provides ISVs with an end-to-end SaaS delivery platform that enables them to go to market faster with SaaS offerings.
In combination with Tenzing’s Everest platform, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering, Apprenda’s SaaSGrid cloud middleware can speed up a partner’s time to market by 40 to 60 per cent while also decreasing overall development costs.
Devon Watson, director of business development at Apprenda, said the recent partnership with Tenzing presents partners with an “out-of-the-box” opportunity.
“By partnering with Tenzing, we offer an out-of-the-box platform that slashes time to revenue, solves both the upfront and ongoing technical and business challenges of delivering SaaS and reduces risks thanks to Tenzing’s ability to support application level SLAs.”
Today’s ISVs often face challenges around architectures which are built on a single environment with only some customization, scalability issues and meeting sales and business processes needs, Atwal said. With Apprenda now on board, he said partners can now addresses these issues to become more successful in the SaaS space.
“SaaSGrid from Apprenda allows ISV customers to help transform their customers seamlessly to a multi-tenancy SaaS-based environment,” he said. “For pure play ISV partners, integration will play a key role for this.”
Tenzing’s business currently is a mix of indirect and direct sales, Atwal said. By the end of this year, his hope is to see 30 per cent of overall revenue go thru partners.
“Partners are a focus for us going into 2011,” he said. “We offer a referral program for partners where the commission is five per cent. For our Premier-level partners, the margins are higher and they also get a percentage of the initial fee, which is something referral partners don’t get. Our target customers are North American ISVs that need a Canadian presence.”
Especially with privacy concerns regarding where data resides and who has access to it, Atwal says having a hosting company that’s based in Canada is a benefit other Canadian businesses can take advantage of. Tenzing currently has data centres located in Toronto, Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C.
“We’re looking for more partners in 2011,” Atwal said. “We want to drive more business thru partners and work more closely with them.”
Atwal said Tenzing has about 100 partners now. The plan for partner growth here is to “find fewer partners that will be most productive in the SaaS and e-commerce spaces,” he added.
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