intY breaks cloud cover

Although probably better known for its MailDefender and WebDefender products, intY has begun a campaign to strengthen and promote its potential in the supply of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the channel.
The firm has grown its channel to 100 active partners in just four months and has signed service supply agreements with eight of the UK’s largest service providers namely Kcom, Thus/ Cable & Wireless, Daisy, Gamma, Nasstar, Webfusion, Executel and TSG.
Jokingly described as “everybody apart from BT” by managing director of intY, Chris Baldock, he estimates that this alliance represents service providers with access to 60 percent of the addressable target market.
Although the firm has 3000 customers and its legacy software scans around 25m email a day, Baldock believes, “the days of the traditional mail server are over, that business is dead ... customers expect that to be an integrated part of policy driven, email, archive, messaging, security and collaboration.”
intY software and services have been predominately sold as white label or directly to larger enterprise but it is now moving to more channel centric model. “We can’t grow our business with direct touch,” admits Baldock but concedes that its FTSE 100 type organisations are likely to remain direct touch for the foreseeable future.
Baldock believes the start of its journey from out of the shadows was its Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite syndication agreement it signed last year. This vote of confidence from Microsoft allowed it to join a top table including the likes of BT, France Telecom and Vodafone as the only EMEA syndication providers of the popular Microsoft family. “People started asking ‘Why has intY got this agreement?” says Baldock. “In part it’s our technology and installed user base,” but he also believes its agnostic nature means that Microsoft gets a partner that will sell across bi-partisan channel lines.
The firm’s background in billing, provisioning and management systems also sits will well with its move into cloud. Baldock is keen to stress that they are not just signing up any partner: “the cost of us engaging with them is not practical,” he says, and as such the firm is only recruiting integrators and resale agents that are committed to a cloud model. “We suggest they leave their existing customers alone and target the mid market,” an area that smaller systems integrators and resellers may have avoided due to lack of internal technical capability. The firm aims to hit a ceiling of around 300 active partners over the next year.
intY offers a common single platform for partners to provision, bill and support a range of solutions including the core Microsoft family of Exchange, Sharepoint, Office live and communication server. These are further wrapped with email scanning, archive and security. The firm has just added CRM and Baldock believes that including more SaaS is the logical next step alongside securing international partner agreements.
Baldock envisages a future where aggregation of many services are delivered from a single platform with the channel offering the value add of consulting, migration and integration backed by larger service providers. However, he believes that traditional resellers who think they can simply carry on without a cloud or hosted strategy are “deluded” and are simply going to perish over the next five years.
 
Channel Pro comment
On paper intY is an interesting company and its history as a software supplier to the hosted market actually gives it an immediate relationship building benefit in the emerging SaaS / cloud community. However, it is still a privately run and a relatively small business compared to other BPOS rivals like BT, France Telecom and Vodafone. It truly is David versus Goliath and his two huge brothers.
At the moment, it has got in fast with a channel that has known it for a while but even Baldock admits that they can’t stay under the radar forever. The lack of international capability is an issue for true multinational customers and whether it has the brand clout to hold its own in a market that will eventually see the same churn pressures as other utilities will be interesting. Cloud is a great leveller and intY might well become a major cloud service provider and is certainly worthy of consideration by the channel at this pivotal point.