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AppRiver Empower Microsoft Partners

Cloud
AppRiver today announced its participation in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program. The program is designed to strengthen customer relationships and expand cloud sales opportunities by enabling partners to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services, as well as directly provision, manage and support products and services.

Under this program, AppRiver owns the complete customer lifecycle, allowing partners to easily sell Office 365 subscriptions and helping them take advantage of cloud services by owning the entire billing process and directly managing support.

“AppRiver’s channel partners advocated strongly for just such a program that would allow them to maintain and control their customer relationships,” said Scott Paul, Senior Director of Sales Operations. “We were fortunate to be one of just a few companies worldwide to pilot that two-tier program and the results have been phenomenal. It’s exciting that more partners will now be able to take advantage of it.”

To illustrate, the company realized a 240-percent increase in the total number of partners engaged to sell Office 365 since introducing two-tier pricing last year. Revenue growth and total number of Office 365 seats sold also grew by 330 percent.

“The Cloud Solution Provider Program puts our partners at the center of the customer relationship,” said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “Through their participation, Cloud Distributors have demonstrated dedication to helping the broad channel as well as our mutual customers successfully move to the cloud.”

Since inception, AppRiver has offered cloud-based security services that are available on a subscription basis and offered at a fraction of the cost of managing the same services in-house. In 2011, the company added Microsoft Office 365 to its security suite so to offer business clients around the globe more choices, enhanced functionality and greater overall value.