Channel main force for US integration vendor

US vendor InterSystems has credited its channel as the main cause of a 60 percent leap in Australian revenue that it expects will help allow it to turn a profit by the end of this year.

Denis Tebbutt, MD at InterSystems in Australia, said the EAI vendor's revenues had grown rapidly – by 60 percent in Australia and 40 percent globally by revenue – in 2003. Although that growth was admittedly from a small base, it was largely due to its partners, he said.

The company had also grown 20 percent globally in 2002, the year it had started selling to the Australian market, he said.

'The primary contributor to growth is our investment in our partner program over the last ten years. Really, it's our partners that are growing,' Tebbutt said. 'We would expect to turn profitable by the end of this year.'

InterSystems in Australia signed some 40 partners last year and a total 63 since July 2002. The vendor itself now has 12 staff in-country, after a decade of having one 'technical guy' based in Melbourne, he added.

The vendor's partners were doubtless assisted by the expansion of InterSystems' portfolio. The company recently launched an integration platform called Ensemble. Previously, it had relied on sales of its seven-year-old post-relational database offering, Cache.

Tebbutt had high hopes for Ensemble as application integration increased in importance. InterSystems was promising further support for its partners, which Tebbutt added often themselves found moving between IT platforms difficult.

'The gestation period is long. They have to keep their businesses running,' he said.

The company had launched a website and was also putting together programs to extend its marketing coverage, which should also further assist partners, Tebbutt said.

Key, however, was InterSystems' ability to adapt its partner assistance to each partner's needs, he claimed.

'People say everybody's got a partner program. Yes, that's true but we've been in the industry long enough to know what doesn't work,' he said. 'Yes, we have all the fundamental stuff people have, but that's kind of a clerical process.'