‘A marketplace is a strategic must for us, and a huge opportunity for our partners’
Dyanix has launched a marketplace as a springboard to growth that will connect the solutions provider and its 4,000 resellers to the huge ecosystem of vendors and solutions on the CloudBlue platform. Jeroen Kant, Chief Strategy Officer at Dyanix, explains
Dyanix is a solutions provider in the broad space of digital transformation – and is now in the middle of its own radical process of change. In a huge strategic leap forward, it is launching a marketplace, partly in response to a demand in the market for automation and self-service, but predominantly to expand its offering.
“We want to have a portfolio of 50 as-a-service solutions within the next few years,” says Jeroen Kant, Chief Strategy Officer at Dyanix, “at the moment we offer 10. We don’t have the resources to pursue our growth objectives the way we currently do things, and this is why we need a marketplace.”
With its headquarters in the Netherlands, Dyanix has 160 employees across Europe, serving a network of 4,000 resellers and more than 25 vendors. “We are not a passive ‘pass-the-parcel’ distributor,” says Kant. “In everything we do, we try to add value, both for our vendors and resellers. If we can’t see a way to add value to a solution, we do not offer it.”
Dyanix is also a European leader in the distribution of image capture solutions – a market in flux. “Typically, we would sell a scanner, some software and agreed services,” says Kant, “with the customer paying for that package. But different models are now emerging around cloud solutions and increasingly, customers want to pay per month or per user, and then to manage that themselves.”
Flexibility was key to Dyanix in its choice of marketplace; it needed a cloud-based platform to sell more than only cloud solutions.
“For us, it’s really important that we can add everything-as-a-service to the platform: hardware-as-a-service, software-as-a-service. That was a line in the sand for us.”
The XaaS marketplace model will enable Dyanix to extend automation across its different business arms and grow its network of vendors, products, and resellers.
“But the core doesn’t change,” adds Kant. “What drives our business model is the value that we add to everything we sell and do.”
Where Dyanix adds value
One of the recent additions to the Dyanix portfolio is the digital adoption platform Apty, which has been gaining traction in the US. The business wanted to expand by establishing a reseller network in the EMEA region but lacked the reseller infrastructure or local knowledge to do that. “So they came to us,” says Kant. “We are present in 30 countries and we ‘speak’ eleven languages so we connect vendors such as Apty to our network and local expertise – that’s the value we add for them.”
For the resellers, the partnership with Dyanix gives them the commercial opportunity to bring new solutions to the market, while they also get project support and help with training and onboarding.
The Dyanix Cloud Marketplace (DCM) adds another dimension to this because resellers will be able to put their own solutions on it.
Kant explains. “We sell Kofax software, which is a document management solution. Perhaps one of our resellers has created a certain type of connector, which they use to scan into a certain document management system or backend system. We can put that connector in our XaaS marketplace for them.”
There is a real demand for this; resellers from the markets where DCM will be launching initially – Germany, UK, and Spain – are already approaching Dyanix with requests to have their own solutions included in the marketplace. “This changes our position within the whole ecosystem,” says Kant. “Normally, you always had the vendor, Dyanix, the reseller, and the end user. But the marketplace is blurring these boundaries.”
Resellers will leverage the market reach and expertise of Dyanix in the same way as its vendors do already. “The logic is the same. A reseller here in the Netherlands has a great piece of software and they want to go to Germany or Spain but they don’t speak the language and they don’t have a network. Well, they can put their solution in our marketplace and we will start doing the marketing and the sales and everything around it so that they can grow their business outside their own systems.”
The marketplace creates a virtuous cycle where Dyanix attracts more vendors and resellers, who will in turn contribute with their own solutions, and so build momentum.
But why does Dyanix need a marketplace to grow its portfolio?
“It’s about visibility and automation,” says Kant. “At the moment, our sales team has to go to the reseller with new solutions but if it’s in a marketplace it’s out there for the reseller to see. Of course, they can still reach out to us for information, but a lot of that initial effort won’t be necessary. And so the marketplace shortens the sales cycle which is one of our strategic objectives.”
Growth is also hampered by a lack of automation, as many of the processes around ordering and invoicing are manual. By making its marketplace an environment for customers to find but also to purchase and manage all their services and solutions, Dyanix frees up the resources required to onboard additional vendors and solutions. “If resellers want to add users or subscriptions, they can do that by themselves, and everything in the background will be automated, for the reseller as well as for us.”
The choice of cloud platform
Dyanix looked at a fair number of marketplaces and also considered building a XaaS platform itself. In the end, the choice fell on CloudBlue. More than a marketplace, CloudBlue is really an ecosystem of marketplaces.
“That’s what decided it for us,” says Kant.
Dyanix has around 4,000 active resellers; CloudBlue is connected to as many as 100,000 and allows platform participants to cross-fertilise their catalogues across this huge network.
“CloudBlue is already working with a large number of businesses, and we can place our ‘Dyanix’ solutions in their catalogues, which will generate leads for us and for the vendors we are working with. It’s important not to lose sight of that. Tapping into this ecosystem of CloudBlue resellers is also making us more attractive for existing and potential new vendors.”
This is how it could work. One of the marketplaces on the CloudBlue platform could be active in Greece. They see the Workspace 365 app in the catalogue and decide they want to start marketing the solution in Greece where Dyanix has no resellers. Workspace 365 can be added to their catalogue, and the solution will be offered to Greek resellers.
“But the app will be purchased through us because we put it on the CloudBlue marketplace,” Kant adds. “It could happen the other way around as well of course where we ‘host’ a solution offered by another distributor as part of our catalogue. Resellers who like that solution will come to us and see what else we offer. And so everything is more dynamic, and our network gets an exponential boost.”
New year, new future
The Dyanix Cloud Platform launched in Germany and Spain earlier this month. Further marketplaces will follow shortly after.
“It is easy to add marketplaces to other markets where Dyanix is active, such as the UK, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium, and even the US. As long as we have contracts with the vendors and are ready to sell – which for some markets is trickier than others – we are good to go.”
Dyanix has recently appointed a strategic partnership director, Cheryl Barker, to oversee the process of evaluating and onboarding vendors. “That is an important job because we get a lot of requests, but the idea of the marketplace is not to let our guard down, absolutely not. We want viable solutions where we can add value on a thriving marketplace.”
Its size and delivery model had put a ceiling on Dyanix’s scope for further growth, but the automation implemented in the marketplace platform is going to allow the company to attract and serve more vendors and resellers with a much larger portfolio of solutions.
Its choice of cloud platform folds Dyanix into a vast ecosystem of opportunity, which will further accelerate growth.
“This is a transformative opportunity for Dyanix,” Kant concludes, “because thanks to CloudBlue our core selling point of always adding value will soon reach a vastly bigger market.”
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