Nintex to push into Salesforce channel in Australia

Nintex is set to push beyond its core market around Microsoft Sharepoint and expand its footprint in the Salesforce arena.

The expansion comes on the back of Nintex's June 2015 acquisition of Drawloop, a popular tool in Salesforce AppExchange – a buyout that brought 1,000 customers to Nintex.

Combined, Nintex and Drawloop promise to "quickly automate everyday processes from the back to the front-office", including integrating Office 365 and Salesforce content.

Brian Walshe, the newly appointed vice president of sales for Asia Pacific at Nintex, told CRN that he was in the process of engaging Salesforce partners in Australia, adding that a Drawloop team member has come over from the US to join Walshe's team and help drive the expansion.

Walshe joined Nintex in January after 13 years at Dimension Data.

While Salesforce integration will be a new opportunity for Nintex to grow, Walshe added that the company won't forget about its loyal partners, which number around 40 in Australia and include national solution provider Empired – the winner of the 2015 CRN Fast50 Leader award – and Brisbane-based Myriad Technologies.

He pointed to Oakton as an example of a recent Nintex partner that was seeing strong success by pitching the workflow software as a means for digital transformation.

Nintex automates corporate workflows, everything from annual leave requests to de-provisioning departing staff. Walshe said another fast-growing use case was to digitise security compliance workflows.

The independent software vendor has Australian roots, having been spun out of Melbourne systems integrator OBS, which itself was later acquired by Empired. Now headquartered in the US, Nintex launched its partner program at the 2015 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, under the leadership of former Microsoft senior director of cloud partner strategy Josh Waldo.

Walshe is forecasting a boom in work around Sharepoint too; he expects Microsoft to redouble its focus on the application after years of prioritising Office 365 and email migrations to the cloud.

Microsoft has been vocal about the fact Sharepoint Online offers more customer stickiness than Office 365 migrations, which tend to be one-off projects without a large opportunity for ongoing services. Microsoft has also been beefing up its Fast Track program, which provides customers with free cloud migrations.

"Exchange Online is a services depreciator," said Walshe. "Microsoft is even doing the migrations for you. The services around Exchange for a partner are very limited. When you get a customer onto Sharepoint Online, it creates opportunities."

Having worked at Dimension Data, one of the world's largest systems integrators, Walshe reckons he can bring a strong partner focus to Nintex, which does all its deployments and services through the channel.

He talked up Nintex's offered margins, especially on the subscription version of its software. Licences fees are based on number of workflows that a customer runs, rather than number of seats.

"I don't think anyone will get fat and rich off product margins but I think what we offer are some of the best in the business."

Nintex offers both perpetual and subscription licence options, though the company is focusing on the cloud option. "Partners are a lot better off under subscriptions. They get a margin throughout the life of the subscription – annuity revenue from the licence.

"I think I understand how you made money as a partner. Vendors are very focused on how they make money, not necessarily how the partners make money," Walshe added. "The vendors who were the easiest to deal with and the most responsive were the ones I did the most business with."

He tells his team at Nintex: "Be the most responsive. Be easy to deal with."

Walshe also revealed that he expected Nintex to launch a local Australian data centre in the future, following its launch of a new region in Japan last week. Like Australia, Japan is very focused on data sovereignty, he added.