Seclore tries to drum up OEM alliances

MUMBAI, INDIA: Seclore, a Mumbai-based distributed document management solution vendor, is trying to take its products en masse by tying up with OEM partners in the document management (DM) space.

It believes that these vendors can plug Seclore’s document security and information rights products into their product portfolio to offer an end-to-end solution.

“Our document management solutions offer complementary features like archival, retrieval, workflow process management, which OEM vendors can attach to their existing offerings and take to the market,” said Vishal Gupta, Director, Seclore. He hopes that such an endeavor would give his company quicker access to the customers of the OEMs. “We are looking at implementation partners of DM companies as well, to reach out to more end-customers,” Gupta added.

Currently the company is working with tier-1 solution providers (SPs) like Sify, Datamatics, Allied Digital Services, etc for its FileSource DM solution.

“Our strategy is to work with mid to large SPs as it takes time to enable the smaller partners in terms of their technical expertise and capability to invest in our products,” Gupta noted. At the same time, Seclore is keen to work with SPs who have a regional base, with a good technical team, and can deploy its solution and maintain it for the customers in the future as well.

The challenge that partners selling Seclore face is that while its two product lines are good, convincing customers to invest in it is not easy, said one of Seclore’s partners. “This is because there is no demo that the customer can view on his environment, and therefore they do not understand the concept very well. Also, Seclore’s solution works on the application side, which even most CIOs find difficult to envisage,” he said.

But to take the edge off this situation and sweeten the deal, Seclore offers the post-sale implementation and integration charges for any project entirely to the channel partner, which adds to his total sales margin. In most cases, the recurring post-support charges are also shared with the partner, which is another ongoing business that the partner can look forward to. Gupta added, “In most cases the recurring part of the revenue can be become as big as bagging a new deal altogether.”

Another safeguard that Seclore has adopted for its channel is a minimum customer lock-in period of three years, until the customer specifically asks for a change of solution provider.