Cittio

“We came to this realization that we’d sold our software to everyone we had a relationship with, and all of a sudden, we felt like we were done,” Lerner said. “We all just stood still for a second and said, ‘We’ve exhausted all our relationships.’ ”

At that precise moment, San Francisco-based Cittio, an IT monitoring and management software vendor, became a channel-oriented vendor. “We realized we needed to sell through the people who have the trusted relationships,” Lerner said. “It became very clear.”

Today, at least 80 percent of Cittio’s revenue is delivered through indirect sales from channel partners. These partners either sell the vendor’s WatchTower remote IT monitoring and management software to their customers or use the product to offer lucrative remote services as a managed service provider (MSP), he said. For Cittio, quality trumps quantity when it comes to its reseller ranks. But there is ample room for new partners serious about value-added remote services, he said.

The key word is services, said Lerner, who as former chairman, co-CEO and CTO of e-business solution provider Xuma Technologies built that company’s product, managed services and professional services businesses. He has taken that experience and applied it to WatchTower in an effort to help Cittio’s channel partners earn more professional services dollars. VARs not only have access to the technology to offer diverse, high-margin managed services, but they also receive “fix content,” which Lerner describes as tools they need to solve their customers’ problems quickly and profitably.

Diversifying its routes to market, Cittio just struck a partnership with Rackable Systems, Milpitas, Calif., to provide enterprise system monitoring for Rackable’s large, scale-out cluster architectures, Lerner said.

Strengthened by its growing channel, creative deals like the one with Rackable and ongoing financial backing from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Cittio has significant momentum, he said.

“It’s all about channel quality,” Lerner said. “And that’s what we look to improve upon in the next 12 months. The same way our partners have strong relationships with their customers, we need to have strong relationships with the channel.”