Having a great product is not enough to make business, everyone who has run a company knows that. If they don’t see you, you don’t exist. Since our company web site showed up a couple of months ago, the number of qualified leads (potential qualified partners) has been growing up steadily.
Geographically, they are coming mainly from US and Spain, although they are other countries such as Italy and Brazil catching up fast. Surprisingly, A company from Mauritius has been the last one in filling up our “become a partner” form…
Having in mind the where the visits to our websites -both eBox Platform and eBox Technologies- come from, Germany is missing despite of being the third country in number of visitors, very close to US (first) and Spain (second). I am puzzled, why don’t we have any VAR or MSP from Germany knocking in our door yet?.
Anyway, things are going quite well. In the next few weeks we are going to make public the list with the first authorized eBox partners, both Service and Training, from countries such as US, Spain, Mexico or Singapur.
Having in mind than we just sign partners who show real commitment -say, those which are able to offer a superb quality service-, and the time we employ with them to define and develop their business plan with eBox, we should reach the number of 15-20 partners during the next 16 weeks.
Looking at the map and how (geographically) diverse is the people who approach us it’s really motivating. More partners and more diversity, more fun.
Tags: misc
I remember my days working for a free software services company, where people asked once and again: “how do you make money from open source?”. The answer was simple: “We sell time (hours), like lawyers do”.
Obviously, it’s not that easy, but it worked.
From a open source product company, such eBox Technologies is, the answer is also short, but it needs a longer explanation: “We combine open source with SaaS”.
eBox Technologies is a 100% channel focused company, say, we sell through our global partner network: VARs (Value Added Resellers) and MSPs (Managed Services Providers).
We offer to those IT companies the technology and services to fulfill their customers’ computer networks needs.
On the one hand, the support and training services for efficiently deploying and administering any network service that a SMB requires. eBox Platform, open source small business server (SBS), rules them all: Gateway, UTM, Infrastucture, Office and Unified Communications Server. It’s open source and it’s free.
On the other hand, a fault-tolerant solution to administer and monitor eBox Platform installations from a single interface. eBox Control Center is SaaS, web based and from the cloud.
In summary, eBox Technologies targets the SMB market through a global partner network formed by VARs and MSPs, offering them an open source unified network server -eBox Platform- and the SaaS technology to efficiently manage it -eBox Control Center- .
It’s a business model designed for growth and world domination.
Tags: foundations
