Seera Asia-Pacific region channel manager, Tom Mason
Unified talent management company, Seera, is making big moves in the channel space by launching a new channel program and seeking new partners to expand its local reach. The company’s Asia-Pacific region channel manager, Tom Mason, told ARN growth is on its vision.
Mason was hired at Seera as its Asia-Pacific channel manager two months ago. He joined the company from MYOB, where he served as its Southern Region Cloud strategist for about a year. Prior to that, he was its Victoria partner manager for more than a year.
Mason also served at Trend Micro as its Southern Region Channel partner manager for almost three years, at Blue Coat Systems as its A/NZ Southern Region channel sales manager for almost a year and at Citrix Systems Asia-Pacific as its Southern Region partner relationship manager for three years.
“We’re building our channel from scratch and this is a key part of our strategy going forward. My role at Seera is to help build that. One of the key things I’m looking at is not having lots of partners – I want some key partners that want to work with us,” he said.
According to Mason, the company is looking to bring on board 15 to 20 strategic partners (a mix of national partners and state based partners) across Australia that understands the Cloud and provides good consulting services to its clients.
“You don’t have to be a huge partner. You can be a small and agile partner that wants to work in this particular space. We have found a few partners like Rhipe and we are in negotiations with six more partners.”
The company has also recently launched a new partner program. Named the Seera Partner Program, it aims to offer discounts and deal registration opportunities for partners.
The partner program is tiered with three key tiers – select partner (access to Seera solutions, marketing campaign support, technical support, and consulting assistance); advanced partner (access to marketing development funds, consultative training workshops, and preferred partner technical support); and the premier partner tier which has access to other things like joint-marketing plans and membership to the partner council where partners will have input into the direction Seera progresses in the channel.
“We want to reward partner success. We want to ensure that when a partner brings us an opportunity, we make sure it is profitable for them. We’ve got a close partnership with Microsoft as well and as part of that, we’ll be working with them on lead identification and partners on those leads,” he mentioned.
Mason said Seera is relevant to the market as one of the key challenges that any organisation has is managing their people.
“People are the best and most expensive assets of any company. But then, how do you go about identifying where the gaps are with their people, knowledge, etc.
“That’s where Seera comes in because we provide a solution that is built around those industry frameworks and helps identify where those competencies are. Our solution enables businesses to map those competencies to their people and identify gaps,” he said.
It focuses on workforce analytics and management.
As an example, Mason said one of the companies it has been working with, Service Stream, has been involved with the nbn rollout. And the company aims to bring on board an additional 5000 contractors over the next 12 months.
One of the challenges it had was identifying where the gaps were with regards to certification, training, and competencies. Mason said Seera was able to help Service Stream with reporting on its compliance.
“It is relevant to the channel because it gives them a new talking point. It is a Software-as-a-Service solution, so IT partners can talk to their clients about it instead of just talking about networking or security for example,” he said.
“It allows channel partners to create additional consulting revenue streams for themselves – around workshops or IT project management.”
Mason added that Seera will be increasing its focus into its key verticals, being government, education, and enterprise businesses.
“Our key to success moving forward is with engaging our channel partners and we think now is the time to bring on board these partners to take our solutions to the next level,” he added.
