Regular readers of this semi-occasional blog as well as my formal "columns" (if you can tell the difference, please help me out!) know I’m perpetually fascinated by ways to make things easier. Especially as it pertains to how a solution provider can make his or her own operations run more smoothly.
So in a week where I should normally be blogging about our Xchange conference in Atlanta, I noted yet another alliance relationship out of a company called MaintenanceNet, which provides a hosted service that basically (as it sounds) lets VARs, resellers and systems integrators keep better tabs on the maintenance contracts they're managing for their customers' hardware and software assets.
The company’s latest partner disclosed today is American Digital, a 20-year-old Hewlett-Packard enterprise VAR in Chicago. Earlier this month, MaintenanceNet signed AE Business Solutions, a solution provider in Milwaukee and Madison, Wis., with a serious high-end storage footprint.
Scott Herron, president and CEO of Maintenance, based in Carlsbad, Calif., likes to refer to his platform as a “single system of record” for handling the raw data feeds about upcoming renewals and other down and dirty details about your maintenance business (or lack thereof). Aside from wooing VARs like those mentioned above, he envisions a serious role for distribution and his publicly announced partners include Avnet.
In a white paper entitled “Developing a Profitable Services Annuity Business,” Maintenance writes that it believes maintenance whould be 10 percent to 17 percent of a technology organization’s overall revenue. For channel partners, margins on this business average 10 percent to 20 percent depending on the product covered.
As the debate about attach rates gets louder and vendors turn to you for more "loyalty," you’ve got to wonder how much business you could be leaving on the table by trying to do this sort of thing manually. With something like MaintenanceNet, you can choose what to leave there and where to focus limited resources.
Do you have a handle on your maintenance portfolio? Contact me about this item or anything else on your business mind at hclancy@cmp.com.
