Certeon sees strong growth in leveraging IBM marketing programs and technical resources

IBM ISV & Developer Relations

Business Partner: Certeon Inc.

How IBM Business Partner benefits helped Certeon’s business:

• Certeon sales rose 25 percent in the first year of its formal teaming with IBM

• Certeon Webinars with IBM yielded over 40 companies asking for follow-up demonstrations

• IBM technical resources and assistance enabled Certeon to achieve a key validation for its flagship product

• A variety of IBM marketing communications tools became available to Certeon, extending its visibility globally and into different market segments.

Wide area networks (WANs) have an inherent tendency to put speed bumps in the way of application data. It’s a problem that hits especially hard at software developers working across WANs. Some vendors solve this problem by selling hardware-based network appliances designed to mitigate inherent WAN performance issues. IBM Business Partner, Certeon, Inc., offers software to accelerate application performance across WANs. The Certeon product — aCelera™ Virtual Appliance for Application Acceleration — has been shown to reduce application response times by as much as 95 percent, as well as save IT organizations more than 60 percent in capital and operational TCO.

Privately-held Certeon, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, was established in 2003 and has been leveraging its relations with IBM marketing and technical teams since becoming an IBM Business Partner in early 2008. Since then, it has seen its sales rise by over 25 percent, said Jane Shurtleff, director of marketing communications, at Certeon.

Guidance worked

With the help of two IBM Marketing Resource Managers — one at the IBM Rational® Software unit and the other in the IBM PartnerWorld® team — Shurtleff said the productivity of her small marketing group at the 50-employee company has doubled. “Without their guidance,” she said, “we would not have been able to use these marketing benefits as effectively as we did. With their help, we’re able to reach out to many more prospects. That includes some markets that we hadn’t previously approached, such as the software-configuration-management (SCM) market.”

A key target in the SCM market is the IBM Rational ClearCase® user base. ClearCase is a market leader in providing version control, workspace management, and parallel development support for software development teams. No surprise, then, that one of the most important events for Certeon in 2008 was obtaining its Ready for Rational validation. The Rational Performance and Reliability Team and the Ready for Rational Software Validation team, run through the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, played a key role in working with Certeon to achieve validation.

“During that process, Shurtleff said, “our technical team had crucial help from the Rational Performance and Reliability Team, and, along the way, they became extremely impressed with aCelera’s ability to take remote application response times down from minutes to just seconds.”

According to Shurtleff, “We were able to close quite a large deal just by virtue of having the Ready for Rational validation. We are now actively selling alongside IBM, to enhance the Rational solution with a high-performance, extremely cost-effective solution to address their remote access needs.”

Shurtleff also cites IBM Sales Connections and assistance from the IBM Sales Connections Advocate as a proactive and effective way to navigate the Rational customer base. “Rational customers often reach out to us on their own. To be effective in the selling process we need a comprehensive understanding of the account and their overall goals.” According to Shurtleff, “After entering these prospects into IBM Sales Connections, within a couple of days we are contacted by the IBM Sales Connections advocate. She then introduces us to the appropriate IBM Account Team and together we develop a comprehensive account plan and presentation to best meet the customer’s needs.”

Shurtleff attributes Certeon’s ability to introduce its aCelera solution to a larger number of Rational users to its participation in IBM Sales Connections and support from IBM.

Extra assurance

How important was the combination of the introduction to the IBM Account Teams and the Ready for Rational validation? “Extremely,” said Shurtleff. “Some customers need that little extra assurance from IBM that this is a viable partner — that it’s a partner that IBM truly supports. In addition, having the validation enabled us to join with IBM in a number of Webinars on ClearCase solutions, as well as host regional Rational Users Group meetings. We also will be taking advantage of the IBM Client Event Package, which means that IBM will host an in-person meeting between us and a number of IBM customers at the IBM Innovation Centers in various cities in the U.S. and EMEA.”

“The IBM relationship has not only opened up new opportunities in different product markets, it has helped us to expand our reach globally,” said Shurtleff. “We’re now reaching customers in Brazil, India, and South Africa, which we weren’t doing before. Plus, we’ve seen a number of new customers come from the U.K. and Europe, including some large Rational resellers.”

The IBM-hosted Webinar was the most-used benefit in the early months of the IBM relationship, and according to Shurtleff, “delivered the most immediate results” seen by Certeon. The next most beneficial program that Certeon is taking advantage of is the local IBM Innovation Center (IIC) in Waltham, MA and the Virtual Innovation Center (VIC). “The Waltham IIC and the VIC is a huge asset for our technical staff,” she said. “The IBM technical staff is assisting us in performance testing and technical enablement for all of the IBM products that Certeon currently supports and will support in the future.”

“In early 2009,” she said, “we’ve had over 100 well-qualified leads in hand from the first two Webinars that we held with IBM, and we currently have 10 Rational customers actively evaluating our software.” Shurtleff said Certeon was “pursuing over 40 companies” that expressed interest in its aCelera solution and have asked for follow-up demonstrations or software evaluations. “These prospects all came directly from our joint marketing with IBM.” Another part of that marketing consisted of IBM’s posting the Webinar announcements on customer newsletters, including the Rational Users Group newsletter and IBM solutions-daily Website.

There’s more, though, to Certeon’s ambitions than the SCM market. “Just to mention a couple of new market opportunities,” Shurtleff said, “we’re heading into the realm of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS). There are many WAN limitations for remote workers in both areas, and we think that, working with IBM, we can deliver scalable and cost-effective performance improvements to these markets.”

Shurtleff cites the assistance that Certeon receives through the Waltham IIC and its Sales Resource Manager (SRM) for helping them to gain entry into the SOA and SaaS markets. “We attended a Maximize Your IBM Relationship Event at the IIC and learned of a number of IBM specialties, such as SOA and SaaS, where our aCelera solution would fit. Through our SRM, we were able to meet with representatives from these specialty areas and are now receiving help through the IIC and VIC to test our solution with WebSphere. This assistance will broaden our reach into IBM SOA and SaaS ecosystems and enable us to leverage more sales of our solution and IBM products into these growing markets.”

Listings draw traffic

Another milestone for Certeon was seeing itself listed on certain IBM Websites that highlight solutions from its partners. One is the IBM Business Partner Application Showcase, a feature of PartnerWorld membership in which customers searching for solutions can search with a specific reference to industry expertise. Then there is the IBM Global Solutions Directory (GSD), a repository of information on IBM Business Partner offerings that provides exposure to clients, to the IBM sales networks, and to other IBM Business Partners. And it’s available worldwide in 10 languages.

Both listings, said Shurtleff, have been sources of many referrals to the Certeon Website. She said the GSD listing “is one of the top referring sites for us, out of the 20 or so referring sites that come to my Website.” Certeon, incidentally, is also a reseller of IBM System x servers and of IBM Global Services.

Longer term, Shurtleff said, “We’re looking to our IBM partnership to expand our business relationships, to broaden our distribution channels and to test our aCelera solution with many more IBM products.”