Mike Kohlsdorf (GoTo)
Remote-work solutions vendor LogMeIn has introduced a new partner network to support its company-wide rebrand as GoTo and a major consolidation of its product portfolio into two defined stacks: GoTo Resolve and GoTo Connect.
To date, the company has made a name for itself thanks to products such as video conferencing platform GoToMeeting and webinar platform GoToWebinar, along with remote support solutions. It is also well known for its password manager product, LastPass, which it acquired in 2015.
With the exception of LastPass, which is in the process of being spun out into a separate company, LogMeIn’s entire product range has been rolled up into a simplified portfolio with a single application and two flagship products.
GoToResolve is the company’s all-new IT management and support product. The all-in-one product is designed to simplify small- to medium-sized business (SMB) IT management and support, bringing together functionality from GoTo’s remote access, management and support capabilities with new conversational ticketing and a support toolset.
The company’s GoToConnect offering, meanwhile, is a new combined unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) offering. The new product includes cloud telephony, meetings, messaging, training and contact centre capabilities.
Additional features and functionality include deep Facebook integrations for improved communications for customer-facing teams in their multi-channel portfolios, as well as WebChat widgets that filter website visitor interactions directly into Chat queues and more.
GoTo Connect’s phone, meeting and messaging solution now includes cloud contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) capabilities built for SMBs, aimed at providing flexibility to allow for fast deployment in the market.
The two core products are united by a single application, administrative system and converging user experience.
The GoTo rebrand is clearly being undertaken to help underpin the underlying solution consolidation, drawing upon the branding of some of the company’s most well-known products.
In a bid to support the product consolidation and help ensure continued growth post-consolidation, the company has also launched a new partner program to further enable its growing ecosystem of partners around the globe.
The new GoTo Partner Network is, in the words of GoTo, designed to "empower its growing ecosystem of partners with additional ways to attract customers and increase revenue".
It is claimed the new program has an expanded global focus, with current and new partners able to benefit from additional investments in marketing, new integrations and support for multiple partner types such as managed service providers (MSPs), resellers and distributors.
The program includes a formalised tiering model with associated benefits relative to performance, designed to create additional revenue opportunities for providing remote support, endpoint management and UCaaS and CCaaS products to SMBs.
Indeed, the SMB end of the market is a primary focus for the company as it goes to market with its new product offering.
“What we’re focused on is two areas: SMBs and how well they are being served in terms of their cloud tech, and the second is what’s actually happening in the market. And that’s about remote work and how organisations can become more remote-centric,” Lindsay Brown, GoTo Asia Pacific and Japan vice president, told ARN.
Before the new partner program, LogMeIn had an agency model for a particular set of products and a reseller model for other things, according to Brown. With this in mind, it is hoped that the consolidation into a single model will not only make things simpler for partners, but also enable opportunities for greater engagement with customers.
“Partners have a multi-portfolio approach to be more sticky with their customers, because they’re not just selling one product with us, they’re selling multiple products and they can deliver margin for their businesses,” Brown said.
Moreover, GoTo plans to be “quite aggressive" when it comes to employing the channel to build presence and growth in the market, especially as it works to focus on and specialise in particular market verticals with its new offering.
“We want to be very much channel first and friendly going forward,” Brown said. “It [the channel] has allowed us to accelerate what we’re doing. Where we offer specific reach into certain areas of the market, our partners offer reach into others. For example, we’ve seen great success selling into education through partners where we didn’t in the past.
“And so, a plan to focus on specific verticals will be a part of our integration. Those integrations are going to allow us to have specific propositions int various customer basis,” he added.
The consolidation and rebrand comes as other giants in the unified communications and collaboration (UCC) market iterate rapidly, updating their platforms to get the edge over the competition. Businesses across the globe have been working to keep employees connected following the disruptions caused by COVID-19, and the UCC vendors have been having a field day.
While GoTo may not have been as obviously or, perhaps, publicly updating its product stack as vigorously as players such as Microsoft with its Teams offering or fellow competitor Zoom, it has obviously been busy tinkering around in the background, getting ready to come at the market with a different angle, approach and value proposition.
The company’s evolution comes after feedback from, and engagement with, its customers, many of which have been forever changed by the pandemic. It is claimed the company is committed to empowering its SMB customer ecosystem to drive simplicity and ease, while focusing on affordability.
“This announcement follows a year-long internal company transformation with significant investment in innovation, unification and global go-to-market efforts,” said Mike Kohlsdorf, GoTo president and CEO. “While many providers in the space only solve for one point solution, GoTo is bringing together IT management and support and communications in one application in a completely new and unique way.
“GoTo and the new portfolio better represent the company and our commitment to SMBs. We understand their particular challenges and have the focus and resources needed to address these pain points to better serve their dynamic working environments,” he added.
