KnowNow To Now Work With Partners

"We have decided to work exclusively with partners," said Richard Treadway, KnowNow's vice president of marketing. "We are telling our salespeople to direct their business through partners. That means we will do the initial lead generating, and then send it to potential customers' preferred buying partners."

KnowNow's software uses http as the messaging layer to publish-and-subscribe constantly refreshed data to any application. Customers can continually update cells in an Excel spreadsheet, create reports that glean data from many databases and alert users to changing auction prices.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company picked up sales momentum last year with 45 new customers, giving it 53 customers in total, said Treadway. The company hopes a growing network of "solution partners" will add to that base. To date, KnowNow has signed 59 partners including Accius Systems, a Winchester, Mass., which focuses on the energy and financial services sectors.

"[KnowNow] generated quite a bit of activity last year, which was otherwise quite slow," said Accius President Doug Moore, KnowNow partners will keep 100 percent of the revenue they generate through maintenance and support, the company said. KnowNow will also issue joint press releases with partners and publicize success stories. "And those success stories will have a dedicated account manager for that partner and all of his activities," said Treadway.

Partners will receive 12 hours of technical and four hours of sales training and certified testing over the Web. They will also receive 10 free instances of escalated support; not-for-resale versions of the software; a demo package containing all of KnowNow's demonstrations; and a 30 percent discount off MSRP. The program costs $5,000 to join and $2,500 to renew annually.