MMI's OneView Makes Tracking Licenses A Snap
MMI's OneView isn't primarily a resale play, though the vendor has found increasing receptiveness from VARs happy to package the license management engine and sell it directly to customers, said Frank Casillo, executive vice president of MMI.
But OneView is generally used as a handy-dandy tool for solution providers looking to ease their burden of capturing and managing the licenses on all the devices and software they've installed at their enterprise customers' data centers, he said.
Solution providers not only have access to OneView's discovery data, but they can also tap into MMI's full array of services to pass along the full maintenance of software contracts to the MMI team.
"When a VAR decides to invest in our portfolio of solutions for them, they do it to make more revenue and reduce costs. OneView passes along that [software and hardware license] data to the VAR, and for him it can eliminate cost entirely. It's a value-add that nobody pays for, it just matures out of the relationship that OneView fosters," Casillo said.
Eliminating the need to track his company's plethora of software contracts has been a considerable boon, said Michael Gray, COO at Champions Solutions, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider with an enterprise client base.
"It's been a terrific relationship for us. Working with customers these days, they're all trying to find ways to control cost, but also get better levels of customer service and productivity," Gray said.
Champions Solutions uses MMI's full range of services, Gray said, which means that the vendor essentially runs the discovery and maintenance of software contracts for its VAR partner. "It's an on-demand workforce for us," Gray said, adding that Champions Solutions used to have to hire temporary help when significant numbers of contracts were coming due.
"How many folks we needed on hand depended on how many maintenance contracts were coming up. I used to have to staff up at peak times, now I don't have to worry about that. They do it over at MMI," he said.
Like the CRM products offered by vendors like Connectwise and Autotask, MMI's OneView was designed as tool for solution provider partners to use themselves rather than resell. But that hasn't stopped some partners from figuring out ways to make some added-value profit from doing just that, said Casillo.
"Today, we do not have a formalized channel program. It's not how we chose to go to market. A lot of the solutions we provide are targeted at the channel itself. They use the MMI portal to streamline their own accounts," he said.
"But they'll also take our portal, and even our resources, and brand those and extend it out to their own end users. They can build it into their cost of doing business, but they can also sell it."
Casillo said that the number of North America-based MMI partners currently reselling OneView and the vendor's attendant services is about five and growing.