This year’s annual Softchoice Technology Road Show event tagged, “The Future is NOW,” brought across the message that keeping ahead of the trends, keeping pace with continuous innovation and maintaining relationships are crucial to ensuring a business’s success.
The road show was held at Toronto’s Ontario Science Centre and guests included a wide array of both Softchoice partners and customers. Steve Leslie, SVP of sales and marketing at Softchoice, said the company started out small.
“Softchoice started in Toronto out of a kitchen and it initially started out as a software supplier in the software space,” Leslie said. “We later got into the volume licensing business and that really propelled our growth. We eventually expanded into the United States and we’ve now created a footprint of 34 branches and 4 call centres that span across the U.S. and Canada.”
Leslie also said that with innovation constantly evolving, it’s sometimes hard to manage both the demands of an organization while at the same time trying to keep up with innovation.
Today, the company has built a large partner ecosystem that now includes over 4,000 partners. The bulk are manufacturers and publishers, while upwards of 100 are local solution providers. Leslie says the company continues to look for new partners to bring into its network.
“Our goal is to find the local best of breed partners in various markets to help with deployments of solutions for customers,” Leslie said. “We took on a local model concept where our local ecosystem of partners is supported by a local team, which in turn is supported from a national scale with our call centres and national marketing initiatives.”
To help support its partners, Softchoice has created its Softchoice Partner Alliance Program (SPA) that gives partners the option to fulfill up to 10 specific competencies in various areas to help them deliver solutions. Leslie says it’s also important that Softchoice builds on its partner database so that both they and their customers can engage with them.
When it comes to the company’s vision, Leslie stresses the point of ensuring and maintaining the utmost in customer service as well as continuing to leverage its partner network and core business opportunities, which lie in their software and hardware solutions.
“From a partner perspective, we want to continue to engage with our partners and from a customer perspective, our role is to be able to present options to them,” Leslie said.
As Leslie also noted, being in such a competitive market means it’s more than just about price these days.
“We’re evolving more and more everyday into more of a solutions organization and our partners really help to enable that capability for us,” Leslie said. “The message I’d like to get across to our partners is that we don’t want to build internal capability that’s already available. We want to facilitate collaboration with our partners to build solutions for our customers. We don’t want to build on anything that’s already redundant in the market.”
In closing, Leslie says Softchoice’s future looks very bright from both a company and partner standpoint.
“If you look at Softchoice, we’ve had a great history, a great track record and a proven model,” Leslie said. “Our future looks bright not only because of our position in the United States, but also because of our position in the hardware business.”
