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To bring simplification to people’s workday, Workspace 365 relies on a partner network consisting of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Value Added Resellers (VARs). These MSPs and VARs play a big role in how Workspace 365 conquers complexity for the workforce, and vice versa: Workspace 365 enables MSPs and VARs to bring value to their customers. But how does that work? We’ll get into that in this blog.
What drives Workspace 365?
We always say that we want to maximize the impact of people who make a difference, by conquering complexity to simplify work-life. But what exactly does that mean? How do we simplify the entire work experience?
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Uniting everything in one workspace: Workspace 365 enables people to bring everything they need to work to one place, and simplifies working with those tools and applications. This means that people will always have one consistent starting point, whatever technology they’re using.
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Bridging the gap between the old and the new: when we say ‘whatever technology they’re using’, we mean it: we allow organisations to bridge the gap between old (legacy) and new technology. This includes for example local applications, Citrix applications, remote desktop applications, Windows Virtual Desktop and modern cloud applications, like SaaS applications. We all unify this into a single workspace experience.
Benefits of Workspace 365 for customers
There are two major ways organisations benefit from us doing what we do.
Cutting down costs (up to 70%)
For one, they are able to drastically decrease their infrastructure and software licensing costs. Workspace 365 is completely role-based, which means that people only have access to applications and information that’s relevant to them. To do this, we enable them to only use what they really need and make it scalable.
Save time: an hour a day keeps tech-stress away
Also, we enable great productivity gains for employees. We believe that any time spent searching for information and applications is time wasted – especially in our key verticals such as healthcare, government and education, where resources are limited as it is. By uniting everything, simplifying working with technology, decreasing the amount of logins and streamlining their processes and basically their entire workday, significant time-savings are achieved and they can work more efficiently and productively.
Three trends for customers and the digital workspace
Before we get into Workspace 365’s relationship with MSPs and VARs, it’s good to understand three big trends we notice in our conversations with (potential) customers, that influence both the way we develop our workspace, and the way we collaborate with our partners.
Trend 1: SaaSification of the application landscape
Almost every new application launched today, is running in the browser. Local applications, such as Windows applications, are becoming the exception, and the browser is becoming the standard.
The rise of SaaS-based applications differs per vertical, but is nevertheless an irreversible trend. We expect in the future every organisation to be browser-based or browser-oriented.
Trend 2: The mobile workforce
More and more people aren’t tied to a desk, and work from different locations. They also work on different devices, and need more flexibility in the way they use technology. Many may not have worked a lot with technology before, but as with almost anything nowadays, technology is playing an increasingly bigger role in working efficiently.
Trend 3: Breaking down information siloes
Know the phrase: “there’s an app for that?”. It became popular for a reason. There are more and more apps helping you to complete specific tasks or help you to manage specific processes.
With the rise of SaaS, the threshold to start (or stop) using new applications has become very low due to its flexibility. This results in a large amount of applications people use on a daily basis, and the challenge is to bridge the divide between all that separate information. For people to work efficiently, the data from all those applications needs to be aggregated into a single view.
Why does Workspace 365 work with MSPs and VARs?
Who would you ask for business advise? Logically, people tend to want to ask the expert. And in our case, those experts are the MSPs and VARs.
Customers sometimes do their own research regarding the modern workspace, and look at for example Microsoft, Citrix or VMware. But in the end, they want a trusted advisor that knows them to tell them where to go and that is able to deliver the whole product (digital workspace and all underlying services + support).
Managed Service Providers are the experts in their field, and our partnership with them goes two ways. Naturally, the reason we work with a partner network is to be part of their proposition, and to be included in the advice to the customer. In our turn, we share our knowledge and experience about how we see the IT landscape changing. And of course provide them with a partnership that is a two-way street, which we’ll get into later on.
Why MSPs and VARs are moving to an adaptive workspace
We see many vendors of digital workspace related products, such as Citrix Workspace or Workspace ONE from VMware, that are very focused on their own technology. This, from an organisation’s perspective, can make it very difficult to work with other technologies that are not provided by that specific vendor. And even more difficult to make any changes or switch between technologies or vendors.
The goal of Workspace 365 is to be agnostic. This means that we want to aggregate all applications and information from different systems. Organisations are therefore able to completely customise their application landscape, but still work on one consistent platform, making them independent from the underlying technology.
From a partner perspective, this means that they can create a customised workspace for their customer, with everything they’re using today, but also everything they will be using in the future.
Let’s sketch a situation:
An organisation is now using Citrix XenApp, or XenDesktop. We can integrate all the applications from Citrix. Now let’s say that they want to move a specific amount of applications to Windows Virtual Desktop. In Workspace 365, we can aggregate all of those too. And from an employee perspective, nothing will change.
How do we enable partners to shape their Workspace 365 proposition?
Many ISVs with a partner network look for partners to resell their product: they create it, partners sell it. With Workspace 365 however, there’s a lot more to it than that – it is in fact the other way around. Because we don’t look for resellers, we look for partnerships.
We develop a platform for our partners to make it their own. Partners should not just be one of many to sell a certain product. We want them to use our platform to create their very own unique proposition. To set them apart from their competition, as well as to make their customers productive and to migrate them from their existing technology to future technologies. They really become the chef in their own kitchen, with us providing a fully-stocked kitchen and fridge and pantry to go with it.
Because at the end of the day, reselling is just selling something for someone else. We want them to see it as their own, so they can truly stand out with it.
Why MSPs and VARs choose Workspace 365 as a partner
Managed Service Providers don’t just choose Workspace 365 as a product, but as an organisation as well. Because solely having a good product is not enough. That is why we built the Partner Boost Program.
As mentioned before, want our partners to be able to create their own unique proposition with Workspace 365. In order to do so, we offer them our full support. This comes in two parts:
Onboarding support
To truly embed Workspace 365 in the MSP’s or VAR’sorganisation, we offer an onboarding program to all our partners. This means that we implement the platform, train the consultants, the support team and the sales team, and create the value proposition together.
Support with the first five customers
Workspace 365 knows how to sell Workspace 365, and we know it well. We want to share our knowledge and experience with our partners. That’s why we help them with their first five customers, guiding them through the process and supporting them every step of the way. Because we found that if you are successful with your first five customers, it easily multiplies to twenty five and onwards.
That is how we use our Partner Boost Program to kickstart our partners and help them to be successful, making it a partner play rather than a reselling play.
The Workspace 365 Movement for MSPs and VARs
So as we discussed before, Workspace 365 develops the workspace not just for partners to resell and for customers to purchase, but we truly want it to make a difference in conquering complexity in people’s work lives.
In order to do this as well as possible, we work together with our partners and customers to innovate and build new integrations. For example with our Micro Apps, with which we bring information and applications from third parties into a single workspace and simplify the way employees access information. The customers and partners are the ones that decide what type of applications we should develop for our key verticals, to make them successful.
And we don’t just think about solving a challenge for one customer or partner; what we do for one, we do for all. That’s how we are creating a movement: saving organisations time and resources trying to reinvent their own wheel, why we can invent one wheel that suits everyone. It also goes the other way around: if someone has invented a great wheel, we’d rather use that than waste time inventing our exact same own.
Every integration we build is instantly available for all customers around the globe. “A very good example is an integration we built for a healthcare system,” says CEO Erik Nicolai, “we launched the Micro App on Friday, and on Friday evening it was already enabled by 35 of our customers.”
Why partners white label Workspace 365
It can be risky to start offering new technologies. And by ‘new technologies’ we mean technologies that customers aren’t that familiar with yet. In the Netherlands, Workspace 365 has already established a name for itself, and we are rapidly expanding to the United Kingdom and the United States, among others. However, in many countries, Workspace 365 is not known that well yet, and can be categorised as one of the ‘new technologies’.
So internationally, partners are able to start offering Workspace 365 as their own platform, with their company name and branding, and offering it as a service to their customers. It is a trend we see with many ISVs, enabling organisations to make a difference with their white labelled platform, until the product gets more and more familiar.
We see this happening in the Netherlands too. Customers are recognising Workspace 365 as a product they need. Including it into their Request For Proposals to Managed Service Providers. Now, many Dutch partners that started out offering Workspace 365 as a white labelled platform are now switching to the Workspace 365 label. We recommend choosing for a co-branded workspace as you will be able to use a lot of co-branded marketing materials.
Discover how to boost your business with Workspace 365
Workspace 365 is made successful by Managed Service Providers, because Workspace 365 makes Managed Service Providers successful. If this type of partnership sounds good to you, we may be a match!
