Work-From-Home Surge Accelerates Cameyo’s Channel Program Launch

The virtualization startup has seen business skyrocket amid the coronavirus crisis, prompting it to introduce its first formal program earlier than originally envisioned. Partners have a unique opportunity to ‘rightsize’ their customers’ virtualization strategies, Cameyo’s CMO tells CRN.

Amid a stunning surge in adoption driven by work-from-home mandates, application virtualization startup Cameyo said Wednesday it’s ready to launch its first formal channel program.

The Cameyo Partner Program was envisioned before the pandemic, but the massive transformation of the workplace brought on by the coronavirus crisis accelerated the program’s development and launch, Robb Henshaw, Cameyo’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, told CRN.

“We built a proper program that gives our partners everything they need to build a business and succeed, especially with the rising demand for remote work,” Henshaw said.

[Related: Top 10 Work-From-Home, Remote IT Jobs Right Now: CompTIA]

The startup, founded in 2017 near Raleigh, N.C., has an offering geared at quickly and cost-effectively getting Windows applications up and running in the cloud for delivery to any remote device.

In its first two years of business, up until the pandemic started, Cameyo had accumulated 96 enterprise customers. That’s shot up to more than 220 in the past six months, with the average deal size increasing by 71 percent.

Cameyo has worked opportunistically with resellers in the past, but given the unprecedented market conditions of late it has put more emphasis on thinking about “how do we take those and enable them to deal with this flood of demand around remote work,” Henshaw said.

Ten resellers that previously worked with Cameyo, as well as two new ones, are the inaugural dozen members of the program structured along three tiers determined by revenue requirements.

The program introduces a portal customized for each partner through which it can register deals and access materials, solution briefs, sales decks, case studies and battle cards. All Platinum tier partners have access to market development funds in proportion to their sales.

With companies evolving their thinking on remote work from a temporary stopgap measure to a long-term plan requiring a strategy, Cameyo sees a massive opportunity for those partners “to be a strategic adviser that helps their customers make this transition,” Henshaw said.

Part of their mission is redirecting enterprises away from VPN and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to the Cameyo platform, Henshaw said.

Cameyo partners can help customers “rightsize their virtualization strategy,” he said.

In most organizations, there’s only a fraction of workers who need a full virtual desktop environment—most just need cloud-based access to a few critical apps so they can keep doing their jobs, Henshaw said.

“With the whole world shifting to remote work being a long-term strategy, reseller partners have this massive opportunity to meet the customers where they are and make sure they have a portfolio that can serve everybody’s needs,” Henshaw said.

D&H Distributing has seen its partners take advantage of the unique market niche Cameyo captures, Jason Bystrak, D&H vice president of cloud business, told CRN.

A Google Cloud executive first suggested the Harrisburg, Pa.-based distributor evaluate Cameyo as a potential partner, spawning a thriving alliance, Bystrak said.

Cameyo “packages up software and they basically host it so it can be consumed through any internet browser,” Bystrak said. “That allows us to use that with thin-client devices such as Chromebooks. That’s becoming huge for us, especially with the work-from-home environment that we’re all in right now.”

Some other partners, especially Microsoft-aligned MSPs, are choosing to deploy Cameyo on Azure to complement their cloud practices.

“If I’m an end user, I need absolute simplicity,” Bystrak said. “But if I’m a managed services provider, I want to add value to that environment and actually customize it. Using Azure instances and wrapping all the services around is a great opportunity.”

The new program fills an enablement gap by providing information about how to market and sell the product, as well as online training to partner sales and technical teams.

“We’ve seen a lot of partner programs and [Cameyo’s] seems to be right on the mark,” Bystrak said.