Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect (Part 1)

We’ve discussed the trend of small businesses wanting to buy various cloud services from one trusted vendor. This discussion highlights the same trend, but the solution is different. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing to yourself and AppDirect.

Daniel Saks: I’m the President and Co-CEO of AppDirect. AppDirect makes it incredibly easy for businesses around the world to find, buy, and manage cloud software from their local trusted providers.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean?

Daniel Saks: AppDirect has a platform that acts as an app store of sorts that resellers and software vendors can list all the tools that would be relevant to a small business. With the advent of the cloud, businesses are now starting to use multiple cloud services whether that be Microsoft 365 or Google Apps. We make it very easy for a business to buy all the services that they need from one trusted provider and then manage them in a unified way.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take some example of what kind of customer are using your platform and how. Could you walk us through some use cases?

Daniel Saks: An example of a business that would use our software would be a hairdresser in Arkansas that may have two locations. They need to find a way to build a website to be able to schedule for employees and to be able to have bookkeeping in order to make sure that they can file for taxes. They come to one of our app stores or work with one of our reseller partners. We would be able to give them the tools that they need.

Let’s say they want to use FreshBooks which is an invoicing tool as well as an employee scheduling tool. A website builder at Weebly could come to us, select what they need, get it bundled together, and then have the help that they need to onboard and manage all those services.

Sramana Mitra: Each of the categories where you have offerings, do you have multiple vendors that you work with or do you have dedicated vendors for each category?

Daniel Saks: AppDirect is an ecosystem. It’s open, agnostic, and extensible. We have a large ecosystem of partners for every category. We have thousands of applications that have integrated to our API and hundreds that are in our catalog that can be resold by anybody. Those applications range across a variety of different categories making it very easy for a client to get whatever they need.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model of your company?

Daniel Saks: We are a platform that is sold to partners that want to resell. We work with a lot of different telecoms globally as well as a lot of local VARs. We work with retailers and anyone who’s looking to sell software. We license them a platform which enables us to generate recurring fees. We also take a revenue share of apps sold.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect
1 2 3