Digital a major part of the strategy at Nuvias

Nuvias is expecting its recently rolled out digital tools to save partners time and add more value to the personal contact the firm has with resellers.

Earlier this month, the distributor launched Nuvias Digital, a range of tools for partners to use, including managing subscriptions and contracts, tracking orders and deliveries in real time, and getting a sight of inventory and lead times.

Karl Roe, vice-president of digital transformation and customer success at the Nuvias Group, said this was just the start of increasing digital tools for the channel and it would be adding more depth to the offering over time.

Roe said it had been building more digital processes into the way it did business and the recent launch was a chance to go public with those investments and share them with partners.

“We felt this was the time to bring that to the reseller channel because there’s a demand for self-service,” he said.

Roe said it was important for the distributor to be able to support resellers in any way they wanted to communicate and track orders, both online and with traditional methods.

He was keen to stress that the firm was not pushing the channel into making decisions about how it interacts with the distributor, but rather furnishing them with more options. “Bringing this on as an option, and making this a balancing act between the human interaction and a digital interaction, is the most important bit for us,” he said.

“There is definitely a requirement to have a digital engagement, as well as a personal engagement. That’s why we’ve done it. We’re definitely not replacing one with another, we’re adding to it,” he added. “When we’ve got people talking, they’re talking about real opportunity and being creative around solutions and opportunities for their users and our vendors, instead of talking about where’s my order.”

Making a comparison with choosing which workloads stay on-premise and which go into the cloud, he said there were similar choices to be made about what processes went digital and what remained physical.

Roe added that increasing its digital offering was a major part of the channel player’s strategy, as it was clear that the channel wanted choice, so it had to provide more options for its customers.

“It’s a one-to-one engagement of customers that are registering for Nuvias Digital, and access to the digital toolset. We’re walking through one by one, and learning together what’s relevant for them, and also taking the input of what should be coming on [future] versions of Nuvias Digital,” he added.

Meanwhile, Cloud Distribution, which was recently acquired by Nuvias, has unveiled its first vendor signing since the acquisition, with Deep Instinct being added to the portfolio.

Deep Instinct, which uses deep learning to identify threats before they become a major problem, recently landed $100m in Series D funding to support its go-to-market strategy and indicated earlier this year that it was keen to work with more managed security service providers (MSSPs).

Adam Davison, chief strategy officer at Cloud Distribution, said the portfolio would benefit from the vendor’s technology, particularly given the rising levels of threats.

“The recent global explosion of ransomware attacks breaking through traditional defences illustrates the need for a new, highly innovative approach that stops cyber attacks in their tracks,” he said. “We see a huge opportunity for channel partners currently selling Microsoft Defender or XDR and EDR solutions to offer Deep Instinct’s prevention platform as an additional layer of defines to stop ransomware and phishing attacks including mutations that haven’t even been invented.”   

In response, Graham Howton, channel and MSSP manager at Deep Instinct, said the relationship was part of ongoing plans to increase its channel activity.

“We’re 100% committed to the channel model and investing heavily in developing the ecosystem for our chosen channel partners to be hugely successful,” he said. “Cloud Distribution is the ideal partner for us as it is uniquely positioned to support us in growing our channel to help our partners gain net-new logo customers and drive services revenues at a time of meteoric growth in our business.”