Ingram and Microsoft target Australian licensing growth

Through an exclusive agreement with local firm Intersell, Ingram’s e-commerce portal provides resellers with administration, quoting and licensing renewal tools to improve customer management.

“Licensing is a key focus for Ingram Micro,” said John Walters, sales director at Ingram. “The Ingram and Intersell partnership has delivered web-based tools that are innovative and differentiated, designed to assist with the managing, growing and scaling of resellers’ businesses, and are cost effective too.”

Walters drew particular reference to the License Tracker feature, which enables resellers to better manage when their customers need to renew licensing agreements.

“When we spoke to our SME reseller base they said two things: they need marketing support and an e-commerce website,” said Walters. “The site is for our larger reseller partners too.”

Wayne Troy, general manager of Intersell, said: “We have positioned this [the e-commerce portal] for B2B service-based resellers who are looking for additional value-add in their existing markets.”

Troy said Intersell has found a high success rate on customer renewals through the portal, which enables resellers to more easily manage customers regardless of their size.

Kathryn Saducas, SMB breadth business lead at Microsoft was optimistic the Intersell offering could facilitate the software giant’s targeted licensing growth across Australia.

“Licensing in the SMB [space] is a journey and we are at the start of that. We are on target to reach $110 million in [SMB] breadth revenue in FY08. We plan to grow this incrementally to $50 million in three years.”

Saducas said Microsoft’s research has found that within its definition of an SMB, end-users with between five and 250 PCs, there are over 90,000 businesses which are an opportunity for volume licensing in Australia. “At the moment we are only reaching nine percent of these businesses, which says there is a huge opportunity,” added Saducas.

“Microsoft has two key goals in my area in order to capitalise on this volume licensing opportunity. The first is to acquire new customers and the second goal is to sell more to existing customers.”