Building on the success of its ISV Innovation Hub program in Europe, IT consultancy Crayon has now launched the initiative into the Asia Pacific market. The company’s award-winning approach to supporting startup and established software developers gives selected participants access to resources, expertise and transformational support.
“Since our acquisition of rhipe in 2022, we have worked carefully to ensure our partners enjoyed a smooth and confident transition,” says Rhonda Robati, EVP APAC at Crayon. “With that integration now complete, we’re ready to offer new opportunities to this market. The ISV Innovation Hub is the perfect platform to start that next phase for the APAC region.”
Crayon now operates with a team of 800 across the APAC region and supports over 3,500 regional partners, which includes its ISV ecosystem. Its work through its European ISV Innovation Hub won Crayon a Microsoft Partner of the Year award. Through the Hub, Crayon aims to provide support across a wide range of business development capabilities for startups, scaleups, and established vendors. The program includes strategic advice for its ISV community aimed at supporting their ability to scale and grow. These include regular webinars, 1:1 advisory sessions and community briefings on how to secure funding, improve management of cost and technical debt, to go-to-market strategies, product market fit analysis and elevating security, trust and compliance.
Crayon is hosting a deep dive into its Innovation Hub on October 22 for ISVs interested in learning more. They will cover the benefits for growing and scaling businesses, use of data and AI, and how to thrive on the Microsoft Marketplace.
One Australian Crayon partner that has participated in the ISV Innovation Hub process is cloud customer communications platform CyTrack. With 30 years of experience in the industry and products in 25 countries, CyTrack continued to seek new opportunities across the IT and MSP space.
“We are a Microsoft partner and even a Partner of the Year award winner and we work closely with them on their Marketplace,” says Nick Milan, Founder & Managing Director at CyTrack. “We were looking to improve traction through that channel and talking to Microsoft they introduced us to Crayon. That’s how we learned about the Crayon ISV Innovation Hub and suddenly it seemed like there was a new channel available through their network of MSPs and resellers alongside its very large enterprise base. This made it very attractive to us.”
Milan says that while similar programs may exist around the industry, Crayon quickly proved its Hub was not just another program where a small ISV easily gets lost in the system. He found his team had solid access to highly engaged teams who were dedicated to supporting CyTrack’s next phase of growth.
“They put a lot of effort into making this relationship successful for us, for them, and for their partners. We even came up with ways of working that we could inject into the process that added some extra steps for Crayon – and they embraced that,” says Milan. “I have to give a shout out to Sahara Gaw at Crayon who has just been amazing. She deserves a lot of recognition for her ongoing work for us there.”
“The program has been very consistent. They’ve engaged in a lot of marketing activity for us, and they’ve given us affordable pricing at their trade shows that has given us a lot of added exposure. Talking with other partners around those events they’re all really happy with Crayon, which gives me even more confidence that we’ll continue to see great success too.”
Having been a rhipe and Parallo customer since prior to the Crayon acquisition, Milan also says he has found the transition to be a positive experience for CyTrack. “We are still engaging with the same experts and architects to this day, and the only changes have been for the better. We have more exposure today with Crayon. It’s a real two-way relationship.”
For others exploring the potential of the Crayon ISV Innovation Hub, Milan suggests taking a close look at resources like those offered by the Microsoft Marketplace ahead of applying to ensure you are ready to take full advantage – and maximise your odds of selection into the program.
“Microsoft has very prescriptive blueprints available,” says Milan. “We followed that before engaging with Crayon and it gave us a good bedrock to build upon as we worked through the Hub process. It also impressed Crayon in our application. Given it’s likely the program will become more and more competitive I’d say doing this kind of preparation will set you up for success.”
Milan points out that marketplaces are becoming crucial to modern business engagement for reaching new partners. They offer assurance to customers across cost efficiency, reliability, trust, and convenience. While CyTrack has 30 years of industry experience, Milan notes that the industry moves quickly and the experts at Crayon have enhanced their understanding of what’s important to IT and MSP partners and how they like to work.
“We wanted to achieve greater access to more partners through the ISV Innovation Hub and that has definitely happened,” says Milan. “There are dozens of new partners we are actively engaged with, so this is really happening for us. Crayon is helping us become less of a ‘best kept secret’ at the end of the day.”
To learn more about the ISV innovation Hub, visit ISV Innovation Hub I Crayon Channel APAC.
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