Macromedia Canada’s new manager wants to open more opportunities for partners as it increases enterprise sales.
“In order for us to scale the business in Canada we’re looking to have resellers pick up the biggest portion of that growth,” said Rob Nascimben, who quietly took over the top
job April 1.
That includes “offering a lot of new incentives and things we haven’t done in the past.” Details of the new programs should be announced in a few weeks, he said.
He replaces Ray Miller, who has become the senior Canadian manager for large accounts.
Nascimben came from MatrixOne Inc., a Massachusetts product lifecycle management software company, where he was director of Canadian and north-eastern U.S. sales.
He said he was specifically brought in to grow the division to reflect Macromedia’s new strategy of emphasizing three product lines: Breeze authoring and live Web conferencing applications, Flex presentation software, and versions of Flash for mobile devices.
Macromedia sells most of its products through partners designated as either commercial, government or education resellers.
In Canada these include Softchoice, Software Spectrum, Insight Canada, as well as the New Toronto Group of Mississauga, Ont.
Glenn James, a principal of the New Toronto Group, welcomed the shift to an enterprise strategy.
“”The challenge they have is they need to retools the sales effort from the space where they’ve been, with marketing and seminars which will hopefully lead to a lot of sales, to more of an enterprise model, where the (Macromedia) people target large accounts and work with partners, helping them reach into the market.
He said he’s also about to sign an agreement to become a Breeze solution provider.
Until now there’s been only one Breeze solution provider partner here, Binatech Systems Solutions of Hamilton, Ont.
In an interview this month about the latest Breeze release, version 5, Binatech president Mike Haworth said the product is “going to make Macromedia a leader in the e-learning space.”
In fact he was reluctant to be interviewed, fearing his enthusiasm could spark “hundreds” of VARs to apply to become Breeze resellers.
It won’t be that bad, but Nascimben said his strategy includes signing up “a couple” more Breeze solution providers here in the next three months.
Until recently Breeze was being sold mainly to corporate departments, said Nascimben. However, the company now wants to focus on larger customers.
While resellers will play an increasing role in Macromedia sales, its direct force will still go after large accounts, Nascimben said. But the definition of a large account – which he wouldn’t detail – will be changed.
“We want to increase our direct business,” he said, but also “raise the level of maturity with our resellers so they’re taking [more].”
“Their [revenue] is going to increase, but our direct business is going to increase more. The volume of a [direct] deal is going to be much more significant than in the past. However, our resellers are going to have to help us from a scalability so we can get out to more customers.
“So their business will grow, but the deal size per customer may not change much.”
“They’ll be covering a lot more than they do today, but their deal sizes may not change much.”
However he said resellers “will continue to take up the lion’s share of what we do today.”
His appointment came just weeks before Macromedia accepted a US$3.4 billion all-stock take-over from Adobe Systems. Some industry analysts see Macromedia products gaining from the deal.
In an interview on the latest Breeze release, Garnter analyst James Lundy said Macromedia has not done a good job in marketing the product.
”For resellers it’s a great product,” he said, but “we haven’t seen as much reseller up-take as we’d like.”
In a recent note analysts at Forrester Research wrote that “by acquiring Macromedia, Adobe is riding two emerging trends that will reshape the face of computing for information workers and consumers during the next five years: the predominance of new content-centric applications and the information workplace.”
