Access to more: what Crayon becoming SoftwareOne means for partners

Crayon formally becomes SoftwareOne in October, and the partners who have built their businesses around the distributor are already seeing additional value coming from the combined organisation.

The instinctive response to a change this size is to be concerned with disruption and the potential for new agreements, unfamiliar contacts, a different way of working. However, there’s a different picture being painted by the partners already working across both organisations. What they describe is access to more: deeper expertise, a wider ecosystem and a bigger services engine, sitting behind the same partner-led model they already rely on.

Matt Howard, who leads Crayon's channel business across Australia and New Zealand, has already set out the market case: the value in the channel is shifting to what partners wrap around the transaction, not the transaction itself. The partners interviewed at Crayon Connect are the ones putting that into practice.

Deeper expertise

The first thing partners point to is the depth of specialist capability now within reach, across cloud, data, AI, governance and security, and the fact that they no longer have to build all of it themselves.

For blueAPACHE's Jonathon Tini and Jayati Gulati, that complement to their own teams is the point. "You can't win unless you have the right partners with you," they said. "That's where we see a strong partnership between blueAPACHE and SoftwareOne and Crayon: the expertise they bring to the table and how they complement our internal teams to ultimately look after our customers."

Andrew Yager of Real World Technology Solutions sees it as a chance to go further with customers than the MSP could alone. Advisory and consultancy work is nothing new for his business, he said, "but what we're really getting the opportunity to do is engage at a much deeper level as a result."

It is a practical expression of what Howard describes as the distributor investing so partners do not have to.

A greater global ecosystem

Scale is the second theme. SoftwareOne operates in more than 70 countries, with specialists across its service areas, and partners describe the effect as one of confidence, both inside their own walls and with customers.

"Given the size of SoftwareOne with this recent acquisition, that's really given a lot of confidence internally for ourselves at blueAPACHE, but then also from a customer's perspective as well," Tini and Gulati said.

For Yager, the more immediate benefit is the vendor relationships that come with that footprint. Bridging the gap between a product and what is actually delivered means working closely with the vendors who own it, he said, and Crayon and SoftwareOne have built "deep partnerships with Microsoft" and with vendors such as Veeam and Acronis. That creates opportunities "where otherwise we would have to reach to unknown third-party vendors to deliver services that are outside of our scope," or where conflicts of interest or due diligence mean the work has to be delivered by someone else.

A bigger services engine

Behind both sits the combined services capability. Around 70 per cent of SoftwareOne's Australian business is professional and managed services at the enterprise end of the market, built over three decades. Howard's stated ambition is to make that proven, repeatable delivery available through the channel, so partners get "from point A to point B faster" and make fewer first-time mistakes.

blueAPACHE is already leaning on it. The company anticipates "massive demand in the data and AI space" and wants to be at the front of it. "We can only achieve that at a very large scale in a very short period of time with a significant partner like SoftwareOne and Crayon," Tini and Gulati said. "We can leverage very large, equipped teams, give them that business problem, and they come back in a very efficient way, which supports the scalability of our services too."

Yager makes a similar point about repeatability. Even where his team has the skills in-house, SoftwareOne's vendor connections, tools and processes are "helping us do it in a repeatable and manageable way moving forward."

What ties it together, in the partners' telling, is accountability. "SoftwareOne has proven to be a true partner to blueAPACHE, sharing the responsibility and accountability required to deliver successful outcomes for our customers," Tini and Gulati said

"If anything is going south or wrong, SoftwareOne will jump in and help you out."

That is the answer to the question partners are asking. Becoming SoftwareOne does not take anything away from the model they know. As blueAPACHE puts it: "When our customers succeed, we succeed together." What changes is how much now sits behind it.