technologyreseller.co.uk 23 exceptionally high, revenue. Can we take someone from the bottom to the middle and can we take someone from the middle to the top? Can we create a process that gives partners hope they can get more backup? That’s part of what the points programme does.” Continued investment How effective this programme is won’t be clear until next year, and in the meantime AvePoint is continuing to invest in partners to help boost their sales. “We have two main initiatives next year. First, I’m hoping we’ll have more headcount. My team will probably grow by a minimum of two heads. That’s my stated goal. And we’re also going to put more resources into distribution to allow them to go after more partners and to service more partners effectively. So you’ll probably see a bigger investment from AvePoint into the distribution model. “Last but not least, we’ll invest more into partners in terms of MDF planning. We’ll look to create collaborative plans with them around net new account attacks so they can win more customers and by extension AvePoint can have more customers.” So, what’s the key message that partners should take away from OnPoint? “That, from a partner perspective, AvePoint will always be bigger than you think. There’s so much more you can do with us, and one of our big goals will be to get every partner taking two or three different products regularly. That’s our big goal. The more products you take, the more solutions you can build, the more structured your engagement with us will be. “The other side of it is security. AvePoint is a security vendor. All backup vendors will say that, but AvePoint will always be more than backup. AvePoint will always be more than migration. And AvePoint will always be data-focused. Data’s where everything begins and where all our products come from.” www.avepoint.com of knowledge but is only going to do two deals a year for maybe 50 grand. They might feel a bit hamstrung by it, feel that they’re never commercially viable because end users have the right to buy from wherever they want,” explains Shaw. “What we as a vendor decided to do is develop a program that protects partners’ investment in knowledge and their ability to execute as well as their ability to generate revenue, which is still an important metric. But to level it out – to say ‘Well, you might not generate as much revenue as Joe Bloggs, but you’ve got a huge swathe of accreditations and you’ve got three projects that we already know about. That’s still valuable to us.’ The big players will still be top of the pile, but it allows smaller partners to maybe catch up.” While the programme will take getting used to – “change is difficult for a lot of people,” says Shaw – he is confident it will be welcomed by partners that might not generate huge amounts of revenue but are still committed to AvePoint. “I think it levels the playing field somewhat because you can invest your points and your focus in other areas to keep up your accreditations and to get rewards. By the beginning or middle of next year you’ll see people utilising it and leaning into it once they’ve understood it and understood where their focus lies and where my people say they should accelerate.” From AvePoint’s perspective, the points programme should also raise awareness amongst smaller partners of the breadth of its offering and the value of investing back into the company. “Although partners that are growing revenue significantly demand the most attention, they aren’t any more important than some in the tail, especially if we can find 10 partners in that long tail and turn them into the bulk of our partners that are doing really good, albeit not that are ‘turn on, turn off’, so there’s always a bit of organic churn – ‘I’ve done my project, I don’t need a licence anymore’ – but we’ve still grown our partner base by about 10-15%. My prediction is we’ll have somewhere between 50 and 60 new partners by the end of this year.” Much of this growth is down to the expansion of AvePoint’s distribution network, which is helping to introduce new partners to its platform, and the fact that the platform itself gives those partners scope to embrace additional products and/or managed services. “A lot of the time, partners will start with a backup technology or a migration technology, then find out a bit more at an event like this, and from there start to build out our services model,” says Shaw. Often, this is inspired by AI. “That message to clean your data so Copilot gets the right results and then secure that data so the right people have access to it is really powerful, and we’re still seeing significant uptake from it. But whether you’ve got Copilot or not, whether you’re looking at an AI journey of any sort or not, you still need clean data, you still need secure infrastructure, you still need the ability to understand who can access what. Right now, AI just seems to be the catalyst to act.” New partner programme In August, AvePoint modernised its revenue-based partner programme with a new points-based model designed to reward any reseller or MSP that invests in AvePoint. “You get points for revenue, you get points for deal registrations, you get points for accreditations. Basically, the more you invest, the more you get. The old model was more revenue-based, with different tiers based on the amount of revenue generated. This was really good for partners that can generate significant revenue, but less good for a boutique partner that’s got a high level DATA SECURITY
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