AppSense, the expanding desktop virtualisation and management vendor, is boosting its channel in Europe to reach further downmarket.
It follows a two year plan for simplifying its software, and the release later this year of its version 10 which will be the easiest yet to use and setup, it says.
"We are driven by the customer experience," says Jed Ayres, newly appointed SVP channel marketing, in London for the two day EMEA AppSense channel event, which saw over 100 partners discuss the products and share best practices.
AppSense depends on channels for around 70% of its US sales, targeting 85% now that the product is more stable and has better out of the box functionality.
But it tends to have partners who are closer to systems integrators in approach, and having taken a lot of the complexity out, wants them to drive downmarket in size as well as pitching for the multi-million euro deals.
With changes last year to the partner programme, the desktop specialist is prepared to back its channel with more MDF and encourage them into the smaller projects with shorter sales cycles.
He says that it is doing well in financial services, healthcare and government, where the larger roll-outs tend to be, but these take time to uncover and deliver, so he wants to invest ahead of revenue with 10% more MDF.
With these verticals, and a fast growing market in retail, AppSense is doing well in the UK market and to certain extent in France, but wants more from the Netherland and DACH regions.
Not that it needs to add too many new partners, he says. "We don't need to expand the partner base; we have some very good partners, but we need to them to work at scale," said Ayres.
Some of the growth it wants may depend on its cloud component, also expected later this year, since it finds itself competing with cloud workspace virtualisation vendors.
It has had to adjust to a wider range of involvement by people at the customer now that department heads have more of a say in which IT they buy, and who may be attracted by the cloud systems.
But the double digit growth last year shows what can be done, and leveraging the relationships with Citrix and VMware resellers may yet deliver in Europe.