Avangate SkyCommerce Adds Channel Focus to Online SaaS Sales

Picture this: You’re a small, niche software vendor or SaaS provider that has a nifty product but can’t get the sales traction the big boys enjoy. You don’t have distribution relationships, and your company isn’t big enough to build and deal with the back-end systems necessary for a comprehensive sales portal. What to do?

Enter e-commerce service provider Avangate and its SkyCommerce suite, which combines the company’s e-commerce smarts with a new channel management module to enable companies of any size to manage their online sales and build and manage a channel following.

Yes, there are oodles of e-commerce vendors out there, but there are few that are SaaS-based and none that also includes a channel component, said Carl Theobald, Avangate president and CEO. “Vendors are doing parts of it, such as payments or subscription management. We are the only one that is a complete, end-to-end solution,” he said.

Plus, because it is cloud-based, SkyCommerce can be deployed in minutes and vendors can start selling in one day, he said.
SkyCommerce is comprised of the following three modules:

“The market is going through utter transformation — according to some reports, in three years 70 percent of applications and services will be delivered online,” Theobald said. “Resellers are trying to deal with this phenomena.”

“We call it ‘The democratization of distribution’ – and that can be daunting to some smaller companies,”  said Mike Ni, CMO and senior vice president of Marketing and Products. “How do you address certain verticals? How do you get attention?”

SkyCommerce is Avangate’s introduction into the North American market. The company has its roots in Amsterdam, but has been in business since 2006. Currently it counts as customers a slew of well-known companies such as BitDefender, Kaspersky Lab and Motion Computing.

Is Avangate a game-changer to the standard sales and distribution model? Perhaps not — at least yet. Is it a disruptive technology? You bet. If nothing else, Avangate levels the playing field for smaller vendors looking to get noticed.