Newlease on drive to recruit 200 local resellers

Australian SaaS distributor currently has 15 New Zealand partners

By Hamish Barwick, Auckland | Tuesday, 01 December 2009
Australian SaaS (software as a service)-specialist distributor Newlease aims to recruit 200 New Zealand resellers in the next two years, a lofty target as it currently has 15 on its books.

The company opened an Auckland office in April to develop opportunities here, and ANZ CEO Doug Tutus says the New Zealand SaaS market has been “largely untouched”.

“It’s a greenfield country with respect to bringing on new resellers. Our methodology is to educate resellers about SaaS and we do that alongside our vendors [Mailguard, Microsoft, Trend Micro and VMware].”

Tutus says Newlease identifies reseller companies that might fit its programme and then works with them individually on the process from contracts to deployment.

Local country manager Mark Brown crossed the Tasman from Newlease in Australia in May. He has an extensive IT background, including roles as VMware partner account manager and general manager, wholesale, for Webcentral. Keryn Algie, previously with Insite, joined at the same time as a licensing specialist.

“Every market has its own idiosyncrasies and to service them you need to have local knowledge,” says Tutus. “If we can educate the market with respect to what our specialities are and where our point of differentiation is we can only excel.”

“To service 200 resellers we would need more staff. We’re hoping by the March to June quarter next year we’d be looking at putting on a business development manager [in Auckland].”

He sees mail, CRM and unified communications as prominent opportunities for the deployment of SaaS.

“As this whole cloud initiative evolves there will be more and more product suites coming under this banner. A perfect example is mail management when it comes to spam. Once it’s in your mailbox it’s still spam so a much cleverer way of filtering out is to do it in the cloud.”

Newlease only sells through the channel. “The benefit to the system integrator of purchasing through us is that they’re getting wholesale pricing direct from a distributor.”

Newlease has a partner programme which includes a portal and service provider directory, and it is also creating a local referral programme.

“If someone who doesn’t have a direct relationship, but sees an opportunity, can refer that customer on to us this enables them to make some money for forwarding a customer.”

Tutus says New Zealand is a very important market for Newlease. “We’re committed to offering exceptional service in what is a growing market.”