Technology Reseller finds out more about AvePoint’s channel plans for 2025 from UKI&SA Country Channel Manager Chris Shaw
AvePoint started 2025 with the acquisition of Ydentic, adding new capabilities for MSP partners (see box) and strengthening its offering in data security, governance and resilience built up over more than 20 years through a combination of R&D and acquisitions.
In that period, AvePoint has expanded from its roots in Microsoft Exchange backup and Microsoft SharePoint migration with the addition of around 30 technologies for modernising, optimising and securing digital workspaces, becoming a toolkit not just for the Microsoft ecosystem – last year it won its sixth global Microsoft Partner of the Year award – but also for Google and Salesforce.
A little over a decade ago, AvePoint started to make the transition from selling direct to enterprises to selling through the channel to extend its reach from the enterprise to the mid-market.
UKI&SA Country Channel Manager Chris Shaw says that in the last two or three years, AvePoint has started to ‘industrialise’ its channel programme, giving partners the ability to buy through AvePoint if necessary, but preferably through distribution or marketplaces.
“What that allows us to do,” he explains “is to have a genuine SMB business, a really solid mid-market business and, as the cherry on top, enterprise as well. And, from that starting point, to be able to scale across all those market segments.
“A focus this year is industrialising the channel and making it properly efficient and the primary go-to-serve motion. Our stated goal over the last two or three years has been to be channel-first, so that direct business now doesn’t happen and, where we can, renewals are pushed into partners. We have a tiered partner program behind that and a really robust referrals model.”
What Shaw means by ‘industrialised’ is a programme that works for everyone, that enables AvePoint to sell more and that gives partners added value, rather than just a transactional model.
“There are reward mechanisms; there’s a better MDF program for partners to lean on; there are more collaborative sales motions; and there’s more engagement from people within AvePoint that wouldn’t traditionally have known how to work with the channel. It’s that embracing of the channel that we call industrialisation, and the ability for us to do a lot more with that motion.”
Channel growth
This focus has resulted in a rapid scaling up of AvePoint’s channel business across all regions to the point where today it has more than 3,500 MSP, VAR and system integrator partners worldwide and availability in more than 100 cloud marketplaces.
“If we just look at the UK business, we’ve grown from next to nothing when we first started to multi-millions of pounds worth of business. Our partner ecosystem is in the hundreds now and we still want net new. We’re still hungry. We’re still growing at 30% to 40% as a minimum across our business and in the channel that’s closer to 50% in the UK. Our growth curve is still on the way up and that creates the need for us to streamline, simplify and scale up our channel processes and programmes to support it.”
In the UK, AvePoint encourages partners to deal with distribution partners such as Ingram Micro, TD SYNNEX, Infinigate, Arrow, Also (which recently acquired Westcoast) and Exertis because it is easier for all concerned, although Shaw says that a small minority of partners do still have a direct relationship with AvePoint.
“You get one or two partners who for whatever reason want to come direct to us, but the majority are happy with distribution, because they have a commercial relationship in place, there are better credit lines, it’s easier to transact and it makes things simpler. There’s an element of efficiency in distribution,” he explains.
AvePoint has around 280-300 partners in the UK and, according to Shaw, it is on the lookout for more.
“When I joined a couple of years ago, we had two or three really big fish, four or five good-sized, middle-grade partners and a very long tail. What we’ve done well over the last couple of years is to bulk out the middle and find more to go on the top of the tree. The long tail is still growing and still important, but we’ve made that distribution-managed which allows us to go and find partners that are going to make a difference to us and to our distributors.”
Partner programme
In Q1 or Q2 AvePoint is introducing a new partner programme designed to reward partners, especially managed service providers, for the value they bring, rather than just the volume of sales they do.
“A really, really important point for us this year is that our new partner program for 2025 will be more Microsoftesque, where you get points for investment in us. It won’t just be a revenue conversation, it’ll be about rebates, it’ll be about MDF, it will be about time and exposure for us if we’re co-selling – all those sorts of things that make it easier for an MSP to go to market.”
Shaw adds that partners can also look forward to high levels of support and customisation when it comes to developing opportunities, creating price structures and formulating plans to help them to sell more as well.
Microsoft toolkit
That aside, what else does AvePoint have to offer resellers?
“The ability with the technology we offer, because it is effectively a Microsoft toolkit, to fix multiple scenarios with one vendor. That’s where we see a lot of gain,” says Shaw.
“The best and worst thing about backup is that it can be a race to the bottom, a commodity sale. If all you’re talking about is backup, it sometimes comes down to price. We can have that conversation and there are times when it’s really, really relevant. However, MSPs and resellers increasingly want to take their customer on a journey and want to sell multiple technologies to the same seat within that customer. That is how we separate ourselves from the rest of the pack, and that’s why people come to AvePoint. We let you get your data in the right place through our migration technologies, back it up properly once it’s in the right place, apply the right security profile to it so that you don’t have unintentional breaches, leaks, internal sharing problems and that sort of thing. Then you’re looking at change management, ROI and analytics and, as an extension of that, Copilot-readiness – how you can use our tools to get ready for Copilot. Those sorts of conversation are driving, first, net new partner recruitment and, second, growth in the number of our technologies taken by customers. Our average at the moment is something like 2.7 technologies per customer.”
Backup still accounts for about half of AvePoint’s revenue and around 70% of its customers will take backup in some shape or form.
Growth areas
Shaw says that one of the big growth areas for AvePoint is storage optimisation, particularly amongst backup customers that are now looking to cut costs and reduce the amount of data they retain.
This is leading to conversations around its Opus technology (see below) and driving a lot of organic growth. Another critical area is AI, where AvePoint’s focus is on making customers AI-ready.
“A lot of people don’t know where to start with Copilot. They don’t know how to use it well and they don’t know how to structure their estates and their data to get the most from it. What we tend to say in regard to AI-readiness and Copilot especially is ‘Make sure the right users can get hold of the right data and then raise the bumpers so they can’t get out of their lane. What are they allowed to look at? What can their Copilot find? How structured is your data and how relevant is the data that Copilot bases its
returns on. How ready is your data? How ready are your security permissions and your sharing options? Can you set them up properly?’. Most people say ‘No’, and what we can do to help an MSP guide an end user to a good outcome so that they adopt more Copilot is where most of our conversations go. It’s opened up a huge wave of new partners for us to work with.”
More than backup
This is clearly more of a data management conversation and one of AvePoint’s priorities is to make sure more people know of all it can do for Microsoft, Google, AWS and Salesforce users.
“A lot of conversations will probably start with backup, because that’s what we are known for. It’s still half of all our business, and a really valuable business, but it’s not all of what we do. There’s back up, governance tools, security tools, licence management tools, data lifecycle management. When you create a bit of data, how do you look after it, how do you back it up, how do you govern it, how do you move it? This year, there’s going to be a really big focus on security technology as well, as AvePoint evolves into a genuine backup, governance, security vendor for MSPs and resellers, with everything available from one platform.”
Shaw says that AvePoint has a good history of integrating its acquisitions into its platform, citing tyGraph as an example.
“It started off as a sentiments tool, an HR tool to measure how employees are getting to grips with things, understanding how people are using Microsoft. It looks at all tracking data, at how end users are using technology. Are you generating an ROI from that? Are you using the right levels of plan? Are you on the right type of licensing? All those sorts of things that let an end user say ‘I’ve got the right type of licensing’ or ‘If we put this change into our environment, I need to track how it lands and then measure that with a dashboard and reporting’.
“That was a really, really good acquisition. What I like about tyGraph is Microsoft themselves use it. It’s a really powerful tool, and the growth in tyGraph, even through the acquisition, has been solid. It’s a really interesting proposition for the journey an end user will go on – getting the data in the right place, backing it up, securing it, discovering how people are using it and understanding the implications for ROI of having the right licence in the right place.”
Copilot readiness
Other technologies that Shaw highlights as having real potential are Policies and Insights and Opus, in large part because they both help businesses get ready for Copilot by ensuring data is in a good state and sharing permissions are properly managed.
“Policies and Insights, typically sold as a bundle, give IT managers the ability to see everyone’s permissions, everyone’s ability to share, internally and externally, and who has access to what files. They can very quickly create reports and dashboards that give visibility of an estate that they can then risk profile, add policies to and enforce company-wide to make it very secure. That’s one part.
“The other is Opus, which has its roots in archiving and gives people the ability to look at a body of data and say ‘That’s really relevant; I need to keep hold of that’ or ‘That’s really obsolete; I can delete that’. We run Opus as a scan over a certain dataset, we get the results back and then you can archive or delete to reduce your storage footprint. In addition, it can organise document versions so that the most recent version of information comes to the front,” explains Shaw.
“In the context of Copilot, these solutions give people the right level of control of their data and the right permissions, so Joe Bloggs can’t search for everyone’s payslips, for example, or for medical histories. They can only see theirs with the right permissions and then Opus allows them to make sure they get back the most recent version and the most up to date information. Irrespective of Copilot, that’s really good practice, and it’s one of our fastest growing areas. Last year, it was a couple of per cent of our business. With the big drive for Copilot, it’s closer to 10-15% and if you think about that in the context of our 30-40% growth in the UK that’s a big number we’re doing in that space from a relatively modest start.”
With its interest in Copilot and its focus on developing security solutions organically and through acquisition, AvePoint is a company to watch in 2025. With its new partner programme and expanding portfolio, it is also a company with great potential for MSPs/resellers and their end user customers.
“At beginning of 2023, AvePoint had a handful of software developers, maybe 10% of staff were software developers. By the end of Q1 last year, 25-30% of staff were software developers and close to half of all staff were associated with R&D in some form – product development, product strategy, software development, all those key back-office functions that give a seamless experience to the end users we are heavily invested in. It’s not just about the end sales process, it’s about how well you serve the customer as well. It’s the completeness of vision and that ability to keep on being relevant.”
What’s New at AvePoint
Enhanced IT management
On January 15, AvePoint advanced its mission to transform AvePoint Elements into the industry-leading MSP platform with the acquisition of SaaS company Ydentic, a specialist in centralised multi-tenant management for Microsoft Managed Services Providers (MSPs).
Dr. Tianyi Jiang, CEO and Co-Founder of AvePoint, said that enhancing Elements with Ydentic’s ability to automate IT management tasks and enhance processes would help MSPs reduce operating costs and increase operational efficiency.
He said: “This acquisition aligns perfectly with our strategic priority to scale and expand our channel ecosystem. Together, we will enhance automation, service management and reporting and data insights capabilities for MSPs, creating further competitive differentiation and economic opportunity for our channel partners.
This acquisition is part of AvePoint’s continued investment in the channel business to transform AvePoint Elements into the industry- leading MSP platform.”
AI insights and governance
AvePoint is helping organisations implement Copilot securely by adding benchmarking data for Microsoft 365 Copilot to the tyGraph and MyHub solutions within the AvePoint Confidence Platform for data security, governance and resilience.
New capabilities include the addition of anonymized licensing and Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption data that will enable organisations to benchmark their AI adoption and usage patterns against industry peers; predictive analytics that will help organisations assign licences to individuals whose behaviours in Microsoft 365 predict high AI adoption; and user-level activity data, enabling organisations to improve change management by identifying AI champions and laggards.
The AvePoint Confidence Platform ensures long-term AI success with strong data governance and security solutions, including the MyHub app for managing Microsoft 365 workspaces. New private preview features include risk assessments for data owners so they can manage permissions and address issues like sensitive file shares and oversharing links from their own Teams environments.
John Hodges, Chief Product Officer at AvePoint, said: “Our data governance solution MyHub brings data security to the business owner and allows them to apply the right business context to their data. When the burden of data security and governance is solely put on an IT team, it’s not only inefficient, but it can also be inaccurate, which is why we believe our enhancements to MyHub are critical and go beyond what’s currently in the market.”
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