WebCentral trumpets succSAS

WebCentral has doubled partner numbers in the past year through strong demand for its hosting services.

The company now has 45 application service providers (ASP) partners – up from 22 in February 2005.

Tax software specialist Allume Technology has signed on as the company’s latest partner and would now offer its N-ABLE tax management software offering via Webcentral.

The company also claims some 800 active web developer partners and 300 technical adviser partners – up from none two years ago - in its channel.

WebCentral CEO, Andrew Spicer, said ASP partners in particular were emerging as a major part of the company’s business. They now accounted for 20 percent of corporate sales.

The jump in ASP partner numbers illustrated the increasingly mainstream nature of the software as a service (SAS) sales model, Spicer said.

“It has really taken off in the last 12 to 18 months largely because of Salesforce.com,” he said. “In the US it’s gotten to a point where ISVs can’t get venture capital funding unless they have a SAS model.”

While the increasing breadth of bandwidth was also an obvious market driver for SAS, Spicer said applications were now being written with a SAS delivery model specifically in mind, Spicer said.

“For customers it means they don’t have to have the expensive IT back-end to run the applications,” he said. “ISV partners get the stability of recurring revenues.”

Spicer said WebCentral had spent the last six months investing in its back-end systems to create a platform better capable of integrating a myriad of different application types.

This would allow the company to move to more of a services provider model to derive revenues from managing and ISV partners billing systems and technical support services, he said.

A further $500,000 will be spent over the next year on further building-out such capabilities, Spicer said.