Jamcracker Retools

Primarily an ASP aggregator acting as the provisioning and management entity for several ASP offerings, Jamcracker over the past few months has put more emphasis on selling its XML-based Enterprise application platform.

In the enterprise space, Jamcracker is touting its platform for provisioning in-house applications or its own suite of services. Although Jamcracker plans to sell direct to these customers, 80 percent of those deals will involve a systems integrator partner, said Todd Johnson, senior vice president of platform business for Jamcracker, based here.

A recent enterprise win involved both Accenture and e-learning ASP partner Saba, Johnson said.

In the SMB space, Jamcracker is relying solely on solution providers to sell and implement its platform and services. The company currently has partnerships with Accenture, Unisys and Telus and expects to name three to four other systems integration and carrier partners in the coming months, said Johnson.

"We had to decide what business we wanted to be in, and we decided the best approach would be to have the partners become the aggregator and sell our services as their own to the SMB market and [for our company to sell our platform direct to large enterprises," he said.

Along with a new version of its Enterprise platform, which includes new LDAP directory synchronization services and a software kit that allows partners and customers to snap on their own applications, Jamcracker has added five new ASP services to its platform. With the new partnerships, 23 ASP services are now offered on the Jamcracker platform.

Jamcracker's suite of ASP services now includes management services for Oracle and Siebel from Avasta, Concur Expense from Concur Technologies, performance management services from Perform.com, e-learning from Saba and managed Ariba services from CoreHarbor.

"We see [working with Jamcracker as an opportunity for us to gain an additional sales channel and as an avenue for the SMB market to gain access to a suite of services they wouldn't otherwise be able to access from one provider," said Nicole Lane, vice president of marketing for e-commerce ASP CoreHarbor, Atlanta.

Jamcracker also landed $28.4 million from existing and new investors. Paul Maritz, a former high-ranking Microsoft executive, and Canadian carrier Telus are among the new investors.

Final closing of the round, which will include additional funding, is expected in March.

"The round we just completed gave us a funded business plan and will fund us through break-even in late 2002," said Johnson. "We have additional funding coming up, which is more of a cash cushion."