Exeed encouraging resellers to embrace annuity services

Exeed is taking to the road next month to highlight the opportunities cloud and annuity services offer resellers – and to provide practical sales advice on how to harness that potential.

Jason Cox, Exeed's Microsoft product manager, says the three city Exeed and Microsoft Cloud Roadshow is 'very much' around how to sell not just Microsoft Cloud Service Provider offerings, including Enterprise Mobility Suite, but also complementary products which offer the potential for easy upsell.

"This isn't a deep dive technical roadshow, it's very much how to sell these products, what value they can add to your business, and all about the annuity streams," Cox says.

"A lot of our resellers are really good at selling services as an annuity, now we want to help them move their software into annuity as well as highlight what other software you can bundle in and how you can use your own IP to create even more value – and equally more profit for their business.

"Whether you're a reseller, distributor or vendor, we all need to jump on the annuity bandwagon.

The events start at 10.15 in each city with a morning tea, followed by a 90-minute presentation and lunch.

"We're not taking up too much time of their day," Cox says. "But it will be a really feature-rich hour-and-a-half.

Cox says the roadshow aims to increase awareness of the different products in Microsoft's Cloud Services stack and their potential to help resellers increase revenue.

Of key interest is Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, which Cox says is a perfect offering for attach products like Office 365.

"And it very much suits the IT work going on in a lot of companies at the moment around BYOD," he adds.

"There are a lot of devices being brought into companies, and a lot of companies are really struggling to understand what devices are on their network and how they can manage them.

"Something like Enterprise Mobility Suite gives them the ability to manage any device on their network – running any OS – using one centralised management tool.

EMS includes features such as single sign-ons for devices, device management to ensure devices are up to code to work securely on a corporate network, and security.

The show will also provide advice on converting customers from previous Microsoft licensing platforms to the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider programme.

"As a distributor we believe this is the latest and greatest Microsoft licensing platform for our partners and we believe it offers them the best price, flexibility and customer value when compared to the other products," Cox says.

Azure will also be a key focus for the roadshow, with Exeed offering Azure sales training.

"The easiest way to do Azure is through CSP because it's now in a monthly bill. We're not expecting the customer to buy a bunch of tokens, estimating their usage, anymore," Cox says.

The roadshow isn't only showcasing Microsoft however, with the information-packed 90 minute seminar which makes up the show also detailing third party offerings which can be added to a CSP sale to increase the average selling price.

The distributor already handles SkyKick, to help with email migrations, and Crossware, which applies automatic signature platform to provide consistent signatures to emails sent from any device in an organisation.

Cox teases that by the time the roadshow kicks off next month, Exeed will have several new vendors in its portfolio, including one around Microsoft Azure migrations, and one offering SharePoint management tools.

He says Exeed will be working with best of breed partners who can supplement Microsoft CSP, but will not be offering multiple competing brands.

"We won't be having 10 migration tools. We have Skykick because it is the best brand out there. We have Crossware because we believe it's the best signature support.

"We're not interested in having a marketplace full of millions of products, we just want the best products," he says.

"The future is the cloud and annuity services," Cox says. "We want to help our resellers grow on their path of cloud success or help them get there.

The roadshow kicks off in Christchurch on April 04, heading to Wellington on April 06 before finishing up in Auckland on April 08. For more information or to register for the event, click here.

Exeed also has a number of promotions currently underway to promote Microsoft CSP and EMS, including chances to win Lumia 640 phones, Surface Pros with Type keyboards, Xbox One bundles or seats on an all-expenses paid trip to Waiheke Island for two nights in May.

With Microsoft cloud pricing set to increase on April 01, there's no time like the present to migrate customers to the cloud offerings, Cox notes.