AvePoint Plots Growth by Delivering Office 365, Teams Governance via MSPs

AvePoint is looking to extend the reach of its of migration, data protection and governance solutions for Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint environments by adding managed services providers (MSPs) to its partner ecosystem.

Already one of the most influential Microsoft alliance partners in the community of ISVs that provide management tools for Office 365 and SharePoint, AvePoint has historically delivered a large percentage of its traditional software, and later the SaaS editions, directly to customers and through large systems integrators, with the rest via conventional resellers. Considering AvePoint has roots in targeting large enterprises with distributed SharePoint server farms, that path to market has served the company well.

Now that SharePoint Online, through Office 365, is finding its way into smaller and midsized organizations, AvePoint committed to having MSPs deliver its tools through a new offering called Elements. A recent partnership AvePoint formed with Ingram Micro aims to accelerate its effort to draw MSPs to deliver Office 365 and SharePoint management services to smaller organizations.

AvePoint’s Dux Raymond Sy

The agreement, announced in July during the annual Microsoft Inspire global partner conference, called for Ingram Micro to start listing AvePoint’s migration, management and backup solutions for Office 365 and Dynamics 365 in its Cloud Marketplaces. The arrangement gives MSPs discounted rates to offer the solutions. In the months since it was announced, the partnership has already helped expand AvePoint’s presence through MSPs, according to Dux Raymond Sy, AvePoint’s CMO.

“It’s doing quite well,” Sy told Channel Futures during an interview at the Microsoft Ignite conference earlier this month in Orlando. “It’s exponentially growing. Certainly, the market is totally different than what we’ve served — traditionally, we’ve been selling direct to large organizations. But through this channel, it’s just a new avenue for us to grow our business.”

AvePoint has invested significant resources into Elements, said Matt Wade, vice president of client engagement at H3 Solutions. Wade, an Office 365 Microsoft MVP has worked closely with AvePoint and said the company is one of only a few that have a broad portfolio of SaaS offerings that can help manage Office 365 instances worldwide.

H3 Solutions’ Matt Wade

“I’ve seen projections that AvePoint is expected to gain 40,000 new Elements customers in the next three years,” Wade said. “That’s a win for the industry because Elements can play well with smaller organizations who want to migrate to and manage Office 365 with the power — but without the complexity — of the cloud products AvePoint is currently best known for.”

Also, during Ignite, AvePoint rolled out a new tool called MyHub, which gives organizations that opt to not let their users create Office 365 groups on a self-service basis an alternative way to automate the process of creating groups. MyHub lets users issue requests to create groups in Microsoft Teams, Yammer and SharePoint. “Based on automated policies, depending…

…on who you are, MyHub can provision the group automatically and once it’s provisioned, all of the policies will be enforced automatically,” Sy said.

AvePoint MyHub also lets administrators see all their workspaces in one place. It requires AvePoint Cloud Governance for Office 365, a tool that allows customers to create and enforce a complete governance framework. “Frankly, it’s nice to see an app that can consolidate all your Groups and other relevant work information in one place and deal with provisioning in an easy way,” Wade said. “None of Microsoft’s native products do this.”

MyHub is an add-on component to AvePoint Cloud Governance for Office 365. AvePoint is not currently offering it through the Elements MSP platform as it is intended for organizations who manage their Teams governance internally. However, Sy said AvePoint’s traditional channel partners can deliver the offering. It’s priced at $1.25 per user, per month.