OpSource hosted a webinar on channels in the cloud on 2/10/2010 and I was the featured speaker. The title of the presentation was "Making Channels Work to Grow your SaaS / Cloud Business." We had a large, diverse group on the webinar and the majority stuck around to the end when the moderator, Richard Dym, Chief Marketing Officer of OpSource and I answered some great questions sent in from the audience.
I appreciate the opportunity that OpSource gave Sixteen Ventures to present about Channels in SaaS; a subject that has little consensus in the "Industry." Many think the channel is dead, that if "its on the web" then that is the channel. For those that don't, they treat channels in SaaS the same way they treated channels in Legacy Software; completely disconnected from the application.
Understanding that within the SaaS Business Architecture everything is tightly coupled inside the application, including Marketing, and understanding that Distribution or Channels are part of marketing, then it is easy to see that we need to address this differently in SaaS than the Legacy Software vendors did. And of course, it is the unique features of Network Effect and Ecosystem that are inbuilt with SaaS that will allow vendors to provide tools to empower and motivate the channel beyond anything legacy vendors could do.
Author: Lincoln Murphy (You should follow me on Twitter)