TD Synnex To Bolster Digital Commerce, As-A-Service Capabilities With Apptium Buy

‘Apptium’s expertise in the industry segments that they serve gives us the opportunity to expand our addressable market. And part of that will be bringing platform-as-a-service to a set of customers that in the past we didn’t have a clear offer for if they didn’t buy from us as a distributor,’ says TD Synnex Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Sergio Farache.

IT distribution leader TD Synnex Monday said it has acquired Apptium in a move to significantly beef up its cloud commerce platform and improve its as-a-service capabilities.

Under the deal, for which no dollar value was released, TD Synnex gains the personnel and intellectual property of the company with which it collaborated to build the TD Synnex StreamOne platform.

Rick Kapani (left in above photo), founder and CEO of Apptium, told CRN that his company is a cloud commerce platform provider.

“We focus on the domain of commerce, bringing products, goods, and services to market, and making them available via technology and platforms for our customers across multiple verticals,” Kapani said. “Our concentration has been in telecom, media, entertainment and high tech, to include customers such as TD Synnex.”

Kapani said that Apptium has had a long-standing relationship with TD Synnex as a joint partner in terms of the StreamOne cloud management platform.

“We’ve enjoyed the partnership,” he said. “We’ve grown together, matured together, helped co-build, co-author, and collaborate on several of the solutions you know today as StreamOne. With that, we bring very interesting and mature insights into this industry of what you would call digital, always on, always available across whether it’s in telecom, cloud, IaaS, or anything as a service.”

For TD Synnex, acquiring Apptium after their long-term partnership was important because of the work the two have done together, said TD Synnex Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Sergio Farache (right in above photo).

“We learned to appreciate the ability of Apptium to innovate, to develop quickly, to bring new capabilities and functionality,” Farache said. “And we reached the point where we have been working so closely that we began to co-develop IP. Then as part of our long-term strategic planning, we wanted to ensure that we secured that IP in-house and not necessarily available to others to be consumed.”

Furthermore, the two companies saw that working together and breaking the barriers between vendor and customer and putting them together will simplify the way they bring value to market and how they accelerate innovation, Farache said.

“And in addition to that, Apptium’s expertise in the industry segments that they serve gives us the opportunity to expand our addressable market,” he said. “And part of that will be bringing platform-as-a-service to a set of customers that in the past we didn’t have a clear offer for if they didn’t buy from us as a distributor. I think the combination of those elements and the ambition to really make this area more innovative and faster to market was part of what moved us in this direction. [We can now] accelerate time to revenue for partners, reduce operational costs, and minimize the skills gap that they have.”

The acquisition comes a few months after TD Synnex CEO Patrick Zammit told CRN that his company had only recently resolved issues that plagued its StreamOne cloud marketplace. That resolution, Zammit said, paid off in terms of the number of active vendor and channel partners using StreamOne, leading to a “competitive and stable” platform with 30,000 active partners and 500,000 end users.

Farache acknowledged those issues which happened when TD Synnex started a significant migration from its old StreamOne cloud marketplace the company inherited from Tech Data when Synnex and Tech Data merged to form TD Synnex to the current version, StreamOne Ion.

“We migrated a significant number of partners, in the thousands, and we experienced some hiccups as a consequence of that,” he said. “Significant progress has been made. The migration of that original segment of partners has been accomplished, and we have been successfully delivering platform. We have more than 20,000 partners actively working in the platform. We serve more than 80 countries. We see multibillion-dollar activity in the platform. I would say that we are very comfortable with it.”

TD Synnex has partners on the StreamOne Stellr platform but is in the process of integrating them, Farache said.

In addition to TD Synnex, Apptium worked with customers around the globe, and will continue to do so, Kapani said.

“One of the things that I would have to say that I greatly admire about the strategy related to the acquisition and Apptium joining the TD Synnex family is that TD Synnex recognizes the speed of innovation and the rate of change throughout the industry,” he said. “There are advancements to be leveraged. Apptium services multiple multi-billion-dollar companies, bringing in those requirements, addressing new market segments, addressing geographies and differences of approach in terms of the commerce segment, as well as sharing with those companies’ capabilities that TD Synnex is bringing to market.”

Apptium’s ecosystem is about collaboration, Kapani said.

“It’s about collaboration within the ecosystem instead of developing in a vacuum and only developing for TD Synnex,” he said. “TD Synnex wants to open itself up and be a true ecosystem partner throughout the globe, where it can share its assets, its innovations, and also rely on others to contribute to that same ecosystem for mutual benefit. That’s what’s needed, because no one company today can keep up with the rate of change that’s happening throughout the globe.”

For TD Synnex, Apptium also brings capabilities to expand the distributor’s addressable market, Farache said.

“And the way we intend to do that is bringing this concept of platform-as-a-service,” he said. “As you know, we have several tier one and tier two customers who acquire direct from the vendors,” he said. “They don’t necessarily buy from us as a distributor, but they have the same needs related to technology, automation, commerce flow, life cycle management, and all that. In the past, we couldn’t answer those needs they didn’t buy from us. But now we have the ability to provide the concept of platform-as-a-service to help them in the delivery of these capabilities without the massive investments that they would need to develop them from scratch.”

The acquisition is a big step for TD Synnex to help its vendor and channel partners accelerate their time to market and time to revenue, Farache said.

“We’re bringing a great focus on digitalization, innovation, and AI to maximize the operational efficiency and reduce cost of operation,” he said. “This is a model that simplifies the complexity eliminates the skill gaps that in some cases vendors and partners face in bringing this technology to market with expertise in cloud commerce, in the as-a-service area, life cycle management, and on the value proposition that we bring to market.”