Upcoming Apty Program Will Let Partners Harness New Recurring Revenue Model

‘We really believe in the power of the channel. We are an organization that really believes in our ability to add volume and velocity and scale in a very effective manner by being able to create a world-class robust ecosystem to work with. In our opinion, the channel should be no less than 60 percent of our revenue over the next couple of years,’ says Adam Shapiro, global head of partnerships and channels for Apty.

Apty, an Austin, Texas-based software company that focuses on business-critical applications that run HR, finance, sales and operations, is set roll out its new partner program later this month.

The program will allow partners to harness a new recurring revenue model while creating new workflows and extending capabilities for their customers.

“With the pandemic, everything has changed. People are constantly finding new jobs and the ability to make sure that the technology that organizations are spending a lot of money on, tied into the ability for the employees to understand how to use that technology to drive their business outcomes, is a huge gap in the market,” Adam Shapiro, global head of partnerships and channels for Apty, told CRN. “And that’s what Apty solves. It’s a digital adoption platform.”

Apty helps organizations optimize their business processes by guiding them through new software applications and pushing them to complete new processes. Apty combines the power of on-screen guidance with time-saving automation of process compliance. Every month, about 1 million users use Apty to learn web-based applications.

“If someone is going into a marketplace, a commerce engine, to go purchase a SaaS solution, maybe they’re just getting really hung up on the process,” he said. “They’re like, ‘I don’t know what to fill out.’ Maybe a hopeful chatbot comes up and says, ‘Hey, you need to fill it out and you need to fill it out this way.’ That is an aspect of what Apty does.”

Where Apty differentiates itself, he said, is solving for business outcomes and solving for business productivity.

“The way we operate is we put it as an overlay on top of any web or mobile-based SaaS solution,” he said. “And through a few lines of JavaScript, we’re essentially able to read everything that’s going on on the website.”

Apty created a “feature-rich” low-code content developer that allows the business user to create the content and workflows without requiring the IT administrator to spend a week or two developing code, he said. The second piece of Apty is focusing on the analytics to capture user behavior and user insight.

Apty’s newest endeavor is a partner program with three key pillars: referrals, resell partners and strategic partners.

“Apty solves for the biggest gap in terms of assuring that digital transformation projects are successful,” he said. “This is a new managed service opportunity that’s not only going to give MSPs a tremendous amount of value in terms of being able to extend their existing customer base, but also driving more stickiness around the customer life cycle. It’s not only being able to sell into one application, one business unit, but expanding their business over time by conceptualizing what we’re calling adoption-as-a-service.”

CRN spoke with Shapiro to talk more about the soon-to-be launched partner program and how it will benefit partners.

What’s the idea behind launching this partner program?

There are two things. One is we feel that this is a must-have tool to prove how these technologies that you’re selling are actually being adopted and being enabled. The second is giving the partner community, which is moving way more into a solutions approach to how they’re selling, giving them the ability to have a tool that drives the entire methodology. When people look at the GSIs of the world, the Accentures and Deloittes, what you see is a lot of consolidation and acquisition that’s taking place in terms of being very focused on a solution that they offer for a segment of the market. They still have a challenge solving for how those solutions are actually being adopted. Traditionally, the way that the methodology works is you go do consulting, then you do your implementation and then you do your training and development resources. What we’re saying is that’s not the right approach.

By leveraging a tool like Apty that allows you to take and digitize all of your content associated with what you would traditionally do in a classroom environment, post-implementation can now be leveraged as a digital asset. Apty drives that entire process and optimizes that entire process from the second you start consulting to the second you implement, and now it’s giving you an even newer managed service offering to really drive what your value is to your end customer.

Did you see a need for this from your partners? What were they saying?

Yes. There is certainly a need especially as this new kind of disparate approach to how the workforces are working is being able to find the consolidated approach to doing training and enablement in a much more effective manner. The second is you have a lot of partners that understand the logic and the best practices associated with what’s going on in one application, but what happens once they’re outside of that application? A typical enterprise workflow may have anywhere between seven to a dozen applications associated with that workflow. And if you’re a partner that’s responsible for the success of one application, how are you really proving the value and the efficacy of your capabilities if you don’t have visibility into what’s happening across the board, if you don’t have visibility into how your value allows you to go upsell into a customer base across other business units. We saw a lot of partners were just saying, ‘Hey, I stretched my addressable market as far as I can go. I don’t know how to get more revenue out of these customers. I don’t know how to extend the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics.’ Now you have a new managed service offering that’s giving you a new recurring revenue stream that you can incorporate into a monthly recurring revenue model.

You mentioned how the partner program translates to revenue growth for your partners, but is there anything you want to double down on?

This is a new service offering that they get to layer on as another line item. We’ve tied it into a recurring revenue model. Third, we’re allowing the ability to white-label this, to take your intellectual property to incorporate that into Apty and to make it your own that you can drive to market as your own asset. From that respect, partners are making 7X to 12X on top of every single Apty license they sell because they’re creating new content, they’re creating new workflows and they’re extending their capabilities to other application sets.

What are the long-term goals for where you would like to see the partner program in a year?

We really believe in the power of the channel. We are an organization that really believes in our ability to add volume and velocity and scale in a very effective manner by being able to create a world-class robust ecosystem to work with. In our opinion, the channel should be no less than 60 percent of our revenue over the next couple of years. It’s going to give us the ability to showcase ourselves as the pre-eminent digital adoption platform of choice that’s being leveraged by the Salesforces and the ServiceNows and the Microsofts of the world. My desire is to have dozens of very highly proficient trained and certified strategic partners and a wide array of resellers and consultants all around the world that we’re working with in terms of facilitating the ability to present the Apty brand and messaging globally to everyone.