The value-added distributor boost productivity after implementing the cloud services distribution platform
Elly Yates-Roberts |
Advanced Digital Network Distribution (ADN) is a value-added IT technology distributor with sites in Bochum, Munich and Stuttgart in Germany, as well as in Zurich, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria. ADN joined the cloud business at the beginning of 2014 and works with a large number of resellers.
ADN’s main objective was to be the top cloud distributor in its region. Initially, ADN chose to use one of the world’s best known cloud platforms, but a couple of years later it wanted to get a better experience and improve service quality for its resellers and end customers.
The biggest challenge was finding a valuable and efficient cloud marketplace. Given that it was already using a competitor's platform, ADN’s team wanted to find a way to easily migrate its large number of resellers and end customers to a new platform. The ADN project included an integration element too. The company had to collect invoicing information from the platform, transmit this to its enterprise resource planning system and from there, send it to the resellers.
ADN identified two key success factors: the smooth reseller transition from the previous platform to the new one, and establishing an end-to-end and seamless operating flow for the internal cloud team. For this, it turned to Microsoft partner interworks.cloud.
“The interworks.cloud Marketplace functionality is an excellent solution for providing cloud services to our partners,” said Hermann Ramacher, CEO of ADN, Microsoft Direct and Indirect CSP, Germany.
The interworks.cloud platform enables distributors, CSPs and independent software vendors to publish a custom-branded marketplace for their customers or resellers. This enables them to boost their sales and fully automate billing, ordering, payment and support processes for cloud services – all through one integrated cloud platform solution.
By leveraging an own-branded marketplace for cloud services, powered by the interworks.cloud platform, ADN has improved its reseller user experience and significantly increasedrevenue and productivity.
Throughout the project, interworks.cloud’s sales and customer success teams supported ADN's cloud team using scheduled meetings, live training and webcasts. Its business enginers also established a comprehensive training schedule to to show ADN’s team how to use the platform. The interworks.cloud team provided a dedicated programme to quickly import resellers and, with the assistance of this migration tool, the team managed to efficiently transfer all existing resellers to the new platform quickly.
In parallel, the interworks.cloud team designed solutions for ADN to integrate its legacy systems into the platform to ensure full business continuity. The project was a great success and led to measurable results for both ADN and its resellers immediately after implementation.
Since the implementation, ADN has been one of the most successful distributors in the interworks.cloud ecosystem and has
cited the platform’s ‘amazing’ marketplace and ‘comprehensive’ range of easy-to-use functions as the biggest benefits. Just months after implementing the interworks.cloud platform, ADN saw a significant decrease in administration costs – saving more than €3,500 (US$4,094) a month on billing and invoicing. Overall, moving to the new cloud platform resulted in a 10% increase in team productivity.