A small Montreal developer of enterprise resource management software for SMBs is turning to the channel to broaden its North American sales.
ALCiE Integrated Solutions already has six partners in three Canadian provinces, but the company’s president says it will put on a big push this year to recruit partners in every province as well as extend its presence in the U.S.
Frank Zanfino said the company wants “as many partners as possible,” but will settle in the short term for getting representatives beyond Ontario, Quebec and B.C., where it already has partners.
ALCiE – short for assets, liabilities, capital, income and expenses – is a Windows-based financial system running on Oracle for small and medium-sized companies that comes in several editions: Elements, in which buyers can chose modules they want; SME, which includes basic accounts payables and receivables modules; and Enterprise, a Web-based version that can also be deployed in a client-server mode.
Zanfino believes it has another card to play in luring partners in what he admits is a heavily contested market: ALCiE Complimentary Edition, a free version that uses free Oracle’s Database XE, that partners can not only use for demos but can also give to potential customers and earn revenue on by selling implementation and customization services.
The Complimentary Edition is limited to a single user. However, there are no limits to the database size.
If a buyer wants to add modules or users, the fully-licenced versions of ALCiE must be purchased.
Each module costs $1,000, plus $500 for each additional seat. So, for example, the SME Edition with three modules and four users costs $5,000.
Partners get a slice of the licence revenue, Zanfino said, although that depends on the amount of work the partner does on the sale and whether it includes services.
ALCiE has a long history, dating back to its founding as a St. Petersburg, Fla., company in the 1990s. A Montreal company called Computer Time Network acquired the Canadian distribution rights, then spun off ALCiE as a separate company in 2001. A year later it bought the entire rights to the software and has been developing it since.
Until last July it had been selling direct, said Zanfino. But “we felt that we had reached a certain size and that it was time to let others preach the ALCiE message.”
The partner program only has one level at the moment, but that will increase to a multi-level program when numbers warrant, he said.
He’s looking for system integrators and business process consultants who don’t have an ERP offering. Among ALCiE’s advantages, he said, is the scalability of the underlying Oracle database.
In addition to the six Canadian partners it has been able to attract, it also has partners in California, Florida, Texas, Michigan and several in the northeast U.S.
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