Sept/Oct 19 - ChannelVision Magazine

channel management Arguably the biggest news to come out of this fall’s Channel Partner con- ference in Washington D.C., Raue’s Telegration is now part of AppSmart, making it the latest master agent to en- ter the merger/acquisition fray. Many will recall about a year ago, when Southern California-based World Telecom Group (WTG) was acquired and merged with cloud services provider NeoCloud to form AppSmart, a cloud marketplace on which partners can quickly browse, evaluate and bundle all sorts of SaaS offerings for their customers. At the time of the WTG transaction, former WTG CEO and now AppSmart co-CEO Vince Bradley explained how the move differed from the string of re- cent M&As involving master agencies. Rather than a purely financial transac- tion or a means of simply “getting big- ger,” the formation of AppSmart was a “strategic transaction,” said Bradley, one that aligned his company with com- ing but foreseen realities. To Bradley, AppSmart represented the embodiment of a vision he’d been working toward for the better part of 20 years. It’s a vi- sion characterized by WTG’s entrance into the utilities/energy market more than 10 years ago. The vision of a digi- tal platform that offered an expansive portfolio of products enabled by the speed and ease of automation. “The acquisition wasn’t something we needed to do,” said Bradley. “It was something that we wanted to do be- cause we saw the opportunity and an embracing of a vision that we’ve had for some time.” Merging Masters F or some, it may look like the first step toward an exit strategy, but for Denis Raue, it’s more about the culmination of a vision – another start in a long history as a solution provider and master distributor. By Martin Vilaboy Across the country in Michigan, Raue and Telegration held a similar view of where channel sales were heading. For the last several years, he’s been prepar- ing the agency for a transition from the current “IP era” to what Raue calls the “software era.” After all, Telegration was among the first companies to develop ordering and commission programs back in the 1990s and was one of the first to put its agent support network in the cloud. It was also the first master agency to implement Salesforce.com as its platform for opportunity management and order provisioning, said Raue, who will serve as AppSmart’s vice president of corporate development. “Over the years, it has become clear to me that the platform owners would dominate the business,” said Raue about the acquisition. “Similar to Ama- zon and Apple, the AppSmart platform is built to scale to support our partner agencies to distribute services and soft- ware more efficiently.” “If you look at the platforms that Telegration joinsWTG in the AppSmart marketplace 14 Channel Vision | September - October, 2019