Crayon has officially integrated into SoftwareOne in the ANZ region, concluding a transition that first began nearly two years ago when the 13,000-strong, Swiss-headquartered company snapped up Crayon in a deal that valued its Norwegian competitor at US$1.4 billion.
Now, with just the SoftwareOne brand in market moving forward, what does this mean for partners?
According to Mathew Howard, the GM of ANZ channel for SoftwareOne, the combination of the two companies will deliver “greater, broader capability”.
“It's now having a larger breadth of capability and richer experience, and that's through everything that you could think of: cloud, security, data and AI,” he said.
Howard emphasised that although Crayon is now “part of a much larger organisation”, the same team remains and the people that were supporting partners are still there, whether that’s account managers, sales executives or marketing teams.
“I attended an event in Melbourne last week, and I spoke to a partner who asked me, "How's integration going?”; I said, "How do you think integration is going?” and they said, "Well, we haven't really seen much change,” and that was the best answer that we could get,” he shared.
“Having led teams through multiple integrations now, integrating two big companies is not easy to do, but we wanted to make sure as much as possible that our partners didn't feel that integration and [there] was business as usual throughout that.”
Increased external focus vs Rhipe integration
Howard, who has been at SoftwareOne since joining in 2015 as sales director for ANZ, has now been with the combined company for over a decade, following stints as GM for ANZ and senior director for ANZ over four-plus years at Crayon after his time at SoftwareOne.
He stated that when compared to the prior integration - referencing the news from 2021 that saw Rhipe agreed to be fully acquired by Crayon for a total of $400 million - this tike around the company was much more focused on connecting with its partners.
“I was in the business through the Crayon-Rhipe integration and one of my takeaways from the last integration was the need, particularly in [the] channel, to be more externally focused during that integration process,” he told techpartner.news.
“Whilst we're integrating internal people and processes and systems and figuring out reporting lines, you need to make sure that you're supporting your partners on that journey, so we have been purposefully very externally focused; we've run more events than ever before."
Howard said that this has resulted, in the last 12 months, in him meeting face-to-face with 200 partner across ANZ to understand their businesses better and learn where the distributor can work more closely in the future with channel partners to drive growth for their businesses.
“Our business only grows if our partners grow, so we have an interest in trying to understand their business and where they're seeing opportunities that they can capitalise on,” he stated.
“Me hearing firsthand from partners is a great way to take that information back and look at where we continue to make investments.
“Any integration comes with its challenges, but I'm very pleased with the outcome. The feedback from partners has been very strong. They understand why we're doing this, and they see the benefits of it.”
Cloud cost optimisation and building services
Howard shared that an area that SoftwareOne is currently seeing a lot of interest in the channel is around optimisation, particularly cloud cost optimisation.
He said that a lot of the work that the company does with its partners is coaching them on if they are going to deliver that optimisation, how they can then ensure that the customer reinvests those savings into future work with the partner, whether that’s managing their ongoing cloud environment or driving their first AI project.
“Once you're in AI, that is not just a one and done type scenario; that'll always lead on to repeatable opportunities off the back of that,” he said.
“In every engagement that you do, you should be mapping out how can I turn this one-off project into repeatable business.”
For partners looking to build a profitable services practice without hiring a full team of specialists or taking on substantial delivery risk, Howard claimed that SoftwareOne is best equipped to have that conversation with “newly formed partners”.
“They're earlier on in their journey, [they’ve] recently established their business, and they're starting to see opportunities come in from their customer bases. Clearly, we have a lot of partners that are building capability today that they didn't have yesterday, but before you invest in a lot of expensive resources yourself, you need to understand what that addressable market looks like,” he said.
“In almost all instances, I would suggest partner-first. We have that capability, so what you can do is shadow us as you build that capability. We can bring in pre-sales resources to help move that sale through the sales funnel for you faster. When that turns into a professional services piece of work, you can see the creation of the statement of work that we send. You might even want to project manage the delivery.
“The other important thing to do is, particularly with the programmes that are available from the hyperscalers - which are still quite lucrative if you know where to focus - they often require you to have certain accreditation or specialisation. We can handhold you through that process to build that accreditation specialisation up, whilst not leaving any deals on the table or allowing your competitor to come in and do a piece of work.”
