SolarWinds APJ managing director talks Australian market strategy

IT management software vendor SolarWinds' market strategy for 2023 involves moving beyond SMB transactional selling to focused solution selling to mid-market and enterprise customers.

SolarWinds managing director and vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) Aten Lim spoke to CRN Australia, following the vendor’s first Australian roadshow and launch of the vendor’s IT service management data centre in Sydney earlier this year.

“A mature market like Australia has always been early adopters of technology, including cloud security solutions."

"This is the reason why we picked Australia as the first to launch a data centre for a service desk, as it’s also the best place for releasing our observability solution on the Azure marketplace.”

He added that “Australia acts as a launching pad to the rest of the other APJ countries."

"We wanted to put the data centre in a place where we get the best bang for the buck, where we have the assurance and confidence on return on investment,” he added.

“Australia is identified as a tier one country. That means, whether in terms of support, marketing, events, budget, Australia will get the bulk of it," Lim said.

"We are going into the health sector with partners, including managed service providers, global system integrators, value-added resellers and value-added distributors.”

Lim also delved into SolarWinds’ strategy to move from transactional selling with SMBs to more solution-focused selling with mid-market and enterprise customers.

“The way we are talking to the partners now is a very different mode."

"What used to be a very transactional business, hit and run, has now shifted to a very focused solution selling rather than point products.”

Lim said that he wants to shift SolarWinds from just being known as a network monitoring or systems management company and highlight the wider stack of solutions offered.

This includes service desk, database management and hybrid cloud management.

He highlighted that SolarWinds are currently “working with partners to bring a solution set to customers, which is the very premise of the partner summits and roadshow.”

“Under this partner transform program and new go to market approach, it's not a one size fits all strategy across Asia Pacific, because we have developed countries like Singapore and Australia, and we have Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar,” Lim said.

Lim spoke about how SolarWinds selects and streamlines its distributors and partners: “one of the challenges that I personally face with my management team is how do we streamline so that we do more with less?”

“We have had too many distributors, and resellers that we have collected over the last 20 years,” Lim said.

“We have so many, hundreds of resellers across APJ.”

“What we used to do is ‘the more the merrier,’ focusing on quantity, but now, we really look at the quality."

"We need to first understand which market is the growth engine, for example maybe the public sector and government is spending money.”

“We need to streamline and profile what resellers to keep, what MSPs to keep, GSIs to keep, and not only in terms of just retaining, but also how we can upscale their competency to be able to talk about the stack."

"We need to enable them to make sure that they are able to articulate this platform strategy to their customers.”

SolarWinds also touted its connection to channel partners, sharing that partners are given the opportunity to provide feedback to the vendor during monthly business reviews which are then reported back to SolarWinds executives.

The current distributors for the vendor are M.Tech and NEXTGEN, both of which scored an award at the vendor’s APJ partner summit in February this year, alongside MSP Intrepid Solutions.