The IT Channel Company – the story

The IT Channel Company (TICC), founded in 2012, is the channel enabler for leading IT companies. With a diversity of programs and services we help IT companies and their partners/resellers to make their business more successful. From strategy and channel programs to sales and operational results, our international focus and result driven approach leads to profitable business for vendors, distributor, service providers, partners and resellers.

The IT Channel Company is a group of companies with relevance to channel enablement, value added distribution and cloud solutions. Together with our 145 employees in several offices, we deliver services in 17 European countries. Our 1500% growth over the past 3 years has been achieved by the team by:

• focusing on business improvement for our partners and customers
• doing the right investments and innovations at the right time
• using our experience in a way that partners and customers can lower their costs and increase their business.

2004 – Conceptsales

Conceptsales has been founded in 2004 as an independent consulting and training company to help IT companies transform to more value added business like fixed price projects, managed services and cloud. Conceptsales has her main focus on Proposition development, Lead generation and Sales

Improvement. The combination of Consulting and Training has been a real differentiator to any competitor. The pragmatic approach and ability to execute has made Conceptsales successful with consulting in the Netherlands and Academy’s and Partner programs in EMEA. Conceptsales started with a one-on-one approach and transformed their business to a channel approach starting in 2008. Now KPN and Cisco have a channel program provided by Conceptsales including an Academy with very relevant effect on their channel.

The merger has been announced in April 2012 with the slogan: “Strategic partner with the power to execute”. The IT Channel Company focusses on vendors and their partners who want to increase their added value, revenue and profit. We deliver Training & Coaching, Inspiration, Content and Consultancy on the domains:

• Leadership,
• Lead generation,
• Proposition management,
• Marketing & Sales development and
• Delivery improvement.

2007 – PartnerMasterClass

PartnerMasterClass, founded in 2007 as Microsoft Partner Development Center, is focused on enabling Microsoft Dynamics partners to improve their business. Intense training programs for company owners, directors and managers completed with coaching on the job helps partners to transform their business to more vertical market segmentation and higher value add and/or new business models like cloud. The main focus areas of these programs are Strategy and Transformation, Marketing,

Sales, Pre-sales and Project management. Most of the customers are based in Western Europe, but PartnerMasterClass has been active in several other countries in the world and even in Australia. Microsoft did recognize this because the partners who participated in these programs double-digit outperformed their non-participating peers.

2012 – The IT Channel Company

The IT Channel Company started in 2012 by the merger of PartnerMasterClass and Conceptsales. Both companies are successful in the transformation of IT companies. One of the key reasons for this merger was the belief than vendors and their channels need help in the changing IT-market.

2012 – QBS group

In 2012 Microsoft approached us with the request to become Master VAR, this request was mainly based upon the fact that PartnerMasterClass has proved to create a difference with regard to partner performance and was able to execute in larger scale since the merger. This new TICC subsidiary was founded in December 2012. Quattro Business Solutions (hereafter mentioned as QBS group) is worldwide the largest SMB value added distributor of Microsoft Dynamics software. To be able to finance this huge opportunity TICC attracted the capital investor NPM Capital. An Equity investment made it possible to create and increase the business rapidly. The main strategy for QBS group is to increase footprint by adding new partners and new countries and help these partners to accelerate their business.

Essential for the partners are the value added services like:

• marketing & lead generation,
• channel & sales support,
• training & coaching,
• resource optimization,
• partner care,
• solutions & consultancy,
• ISV programs and
• licensing & order desk .

Where normal distributors are mainly focused on the transactions QBS group is perceived as a next­ generation distributor. QBS group delivers a complete portfolio of value added services to the Microsoft partners. Channel partners can choose from different Service Level Agreements. Based on those SLA’s, partners can use the services mentioned above.

Let the figures do the talking: the channel partners working with QBS group are double-digit outperforming their peers. This is also the reason that Microsoft endorses the majority of their smaller SMB partners to work with QBS group.

In the years 2010-2013 a lot of Cloud Transformation Workshops have been executed. More than 200 partners have joined those workshops to get more knowledge around cloud and the impact on their business. For most of the partners it is a challenge to do all the investments needed to get successful in the cloud business.

2014 – OneBizz

Therefore the idea of OneBizz arose in the beginning 2014. Based on the fact that Microsoft has the most complete package to offer to end-customers: NAV, CRM, Lyne, Share Point, Yammer and Office365. Full integration of these applications would be the competitive advantage everyone is dreaming of. And this is exactly what we achieved with OneBizz. For partners it is too expensive to develop. This is why OneBizz makes the difference to partners. OneBizz can easily be resold by our partners and they implement it for the end-user as well. OneBizz is the answer on the changing customer demand and a 100% multi-tenant cloud solution. A complete lead generation and nurturing engine makes the offering even stronger for our partners.

2015 – SalesValue

SalesValue was founded at the end of 2014. This company is focusing on selling KPN solutions to the SME market. SalesValue has an outsourcing contract with KPN (the incumbent Telco in NL) and is an extension of KPN’s retail footprint throughout the Netherlands. The combination of outside sales organized per region and an internal call center for generating leads has proven to be a success formula for growth in the SME market. The revenue of SalesValue is based on a fixed component and a variable component. This revenue model assures that both entities focus on the same goals and objectives.