The Channel Company's ChannelBridge Enriches Partner Portals Through Personalized Content

The Channel Company has teamed up with technology company Webinfinity to launch ChannelBridge, a product aimed at enhancing partner communications and increasing sales through personalized content sharing.

In an attempt to undercut the content congestion of digitized partner portals, ChannelBridge offers a central hub for both vendor channel managers and solution providers to communicate, while utilizing Webinfinity's key technology to share customized tools.

"The problem right now is that there are a lot of vendors invested in a lot of systems and communication vehicles ... that leads to an overflow of content," said Dan Dignam, executive vice president of Westborough, Mass.-based The Channel Company, the publisher of CRN. "What we've built here is something to drive better, two-way collaboration between the partner and the vendor through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It creates a central point of contact between the channel manager and the partner."

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Webinfinity, a Huntington, N.Y.-based technology company, touts its Amazon cloud-based SaaS platform, which enables users to access and share personalized information, systems and customized tools that they need, giving them control of what they want and how they want to see it.

Webinfinity's collaboration technology, coupled with The Channel Company's propriety channel database, ChannelBase, collectively form personalized content communication hubs between solution providers and channel managers.

"Our entire goal is to put that consumer experience on top of what is already there," said James Hodgkinson, CEO of Webinfinity. "When people access their content, it's all about them, and it should be personalized. To do that, we built something that is state of the art in terms of usability ... it works on every device, it's extremely fast and it's very convenient."

ChannelBridge operates on any device, and contains APIs that integrate popular data sources, including SharePoint, Google Drive and Salesforce.com. In addition to shared systems, ChannelBridge allows the facilitated streamlining of information sources, such as event management and webinars.

Through The Channel Company’s ChannelBridge, manufacturers can create individualized, personalized web environments to share customized information, tools and other activities via its channel sales employees to channel partners. On the other end of the spectrum, partners can access personalized content and tools, and facilitate sales teams to create their own point-in-time marketing content.

A channel salesperson for Hewlett-Packard, for instance, might only wish to share certain webinar information or Salesforce activity with a partner selling printers, as opposed to laptops. ChannelBridge allows that user the ability to create an environment to send out classified, tagged information to those specific partners.

Solution providers said they see a need for a tailored platform to share content, especially as most current forms of external communication in the channel have transitioned online.

"This is huge for VARs ... as we move into a digitally driven landscape. We need those tools," said Jed Ayres, chief marketing officer at Cleveland-based solution provider MCPc. "From someone spending money on content that I would like to see aggregated and amplified for my employees, these tools will help me and other solution providers do that in a very thoughtful way."

ChannelBridge will be launched at The Channel Company's 2015 XChange Solution Provider next week in Dallas, a channel conference in the U.S. that brings together a broad array of solution providers and technology vendors to build partnerships.

PUBLISHED FEB. 26, 2015