Inside the AppDirect Acquisition of Tackle.io with John Jahnke and Emanuel Bertolin

John Jahnke + Emanuel Bertolin
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[00:00:00] Emanuel Bertolin: Our vision was always to have a catalog that once you integrate it in, you could access all of the AppDirect marketplaces. And when an ISV looks at how do I go to market, right?

[00:00:11] Do I have my own marketplace? Do I go onto the hyperscaler marketplaces? Our answer is both right? The more exposure you have and the more marketplaces you have, and partnering with Tackle just makes so much sense.

[00:00:24] John Jahnke: It's been a fun week at re:Invent, obviously taking our biggest event of the year and adding an acquisition on top was like gas on the fire. We started Dylan and I, my co-founder. He was really the visionary behind Tackle. We're just exploring a lot of new marketplaces to see what's going on, try to stay in front of where we can help our ISVs sell more, sell faster.

[00:00:44] And fast forward to today, acquisition was announced on Monday, so we couldn't be more excited.

[00:00:49]

[00:00:53] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers.

[00:00:54] Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering, and we are here with a [00:01:00] special announcement edition and we're here at re:Invent and it's been an incredible incredible week. Huh?

[00:01:05] Emanuel Bertolin: Amazing. Yeah, amazing week. It just keeps getting bigger. Yeah.

[00:01:09] John Jahnke: Yeah. This is like Super Bowl week for Tackle.

[00:01:11] Yeah. All our customers and partners are here. It's a, it's been action packed.

[00:01:15] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. That's amazing. So the reason we're talking is Tackle and AppDirect have had a , very significant announcement this week. And so a lot going on. And AppDirect is a acquiring Tackle.

[00:01:28] And so John, so first of all, John Jahnke hey everybody. CEO of of Tackle and Emmanuel Bertolin, CRO. Go by Bert. I go by, yeah. Yeah. So CRO at AppDirect. So we have the right people here. So yeah.

[00:01:44] John Jahnke: Excited. It's been a fun week at re:Invent, obviously taking our biggest event of the year and adding an acquisition on top was like gas on the fire. We started Dylan and I, my co-founder. He was really the visionary behind Tackle. We're just exploring a lot of new marketplaces to see what's going [00:02:00] on, try to stay in front of where we can help our ISVs sell more, sell faster.

[00:02:04] And we knew AppDirect, but we hadn't got an update in a while. And earlier this year we spent some time and we're like, wow it's pretty incredible that they power 400 marketplaces. We didn't really know that at first. And then the more we talked about how could we connect the dots between ISVs and the clouds and those marketplaces, we got really excited and that turned into thinking about partnering to doing something more strategic.

[00:02:26] And fast forward to today, acquisition was announced on Monday, so we couldn't be more excited.

[00:02:31] Chip Rodgers: That's terrific. That's terrific. It is interesting 'cause you're AppDirect is. Is in the , marketplace business. That's your business. Absolutely. Yeah. Billion dollar company.

[00:02:39] And and you're, you've really started in the telecom space, exactly. Yeah. We've been in business

[00:02:45] Emanuel Bertolin: for about 15 years and we started building a marketplace platform and it was really focused on subscription commerce and building a marketplace that could really address the needs of recurring business and [00:03:00] software was obviously the first area 15 years ago that was really obvious. And we also started looking at, who could use a marketplace to sell software solutions. And the telco space was really the first space that we went into.

[00:03:12] So we started working with a lot of the global telecom companies like Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom, British Telecom. The likes of at t and others in North America and powering their business marketplaces for software. As we built out our marketplace platform, we continued to build a catalog of ISVs that were integrated in.

[00:03:34] And our vision was always to have a catalog that once you integrate it in, you could access all of the AppDirect marketplaces. And obviously as the world has evolved, cloud marketplaces and the AWS Marketplace is a huge marketplace right now. And when an ISV looks at how do I go to market, right?

[00:03:54] Do I have my own marketplace? Do I go onto the hyperscaler marketplaces? Our answer [00:04:00] is both right? The more exposure you have and the more marketplaces you have, and partnering with Tackle just makes so much sense. We've been watching these guys for a long time, and we really thought that it would be a really good partnership in marriage. And we decided to, make it the ultimate marriage and and acquire them.

[00:04:19] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. That's terrific. And, so I think it's the the story for AppDirect. I think you've been on this path. You've, over the last year, you've acquired six. I think five or six companies.

[00:04:31] And you're really the idea is to become the everything store, right? Yeah, that's correct.

[00:04:35] Emanuel Bertolin: Yeah. Like when we look at businesses today there's a lot of, a lot of businesses, especially if you look at the SMB / SME, even, even large enterprise, there's a lot of complexity around procuring the products you need to run your business.

[00:04:49] Yeah. And so we're looking at how do we simplify procurement and how can you get a lot of products on one bill, one MSA, a simple [00:05:00] procurement process. And so our catalog is expanded significantly, and we think about categories. So our SaaS portfolio is large. And it's gonna get a lot larger now that we have Tackle yeah, with us, but we also have telecom and we have energy.

[00:05:15] So you can buy in the deregulated states, you can buy your energy contracts, you can buy gas. We're continuing to add products to this catalog and our vision is that, businesses will need. To procure a lot of different products. And after Act just wants to be a source a point where that can, that can be where people procure from.

[00:05:35] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. And so John, now cloud marketplaces are built into that. They're part of the everything story, right? Talk a little bit about, and there's so much value in marketplace, the cloud marketplaces, because you've got the pre-commit drawdowns. Yeah.

[00:05:51] There's, the free money, kind of thing. There are incentives that are built in for the, some of the cloud, the sales team, the field teams. Yeah. [00:06:00] Talk a little bit about, that value and that connection into the broader marketplace is

[00:06:05] John Jahnke: done. Yeah, I mean we, I think we think about this in three ways.

[00:06:08] One, nothing changes for Tackle customers. Like we're gonna continue to stay laser focused on innovating with the hyperscalers and expanding on cloud go to market as it stands. And we'll think a lot about how we continue to differentiate those motions with AWS and others. 'cause that's, that's what our customers really want.

[00:06:24] And then we're gonna build a bridge between Tackle and these other marketplace. And we think that takes shape in a lot of different ways. AWS has pioneered capabilities over the last few years, like Buy with AWS that we think we really can take more advantage of in this new style motion. So we're gonna decompose the problem.

[00:06:41] There's a lot to do. We've talked to more than a hundred customers this week. And the ideas coming from them are really inspiring and we've always been a, like customer focused company. We think about ISVs and channel partners, system integrators, distributors, and how to make all this work. And we're gonna continue to do that more.

[00:06:57] So a lot more to come as we work through the [00:07:00] plan. You'll hear more definitely on an ongoing basis. And I just know there's a lot to help people sell more.

[00:07:05] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So John, we're here at re:Invent My

[00:07:09] John Jahnke: ninth re:Invent.

[00:07:11] Chip Rodgers: So you beat me. I've been five. Okay. That's pretty good. That's true.

[00:07:14] That's awesome. So what's been the response, I'm sure you've been talking to a lot of AWS folks. What's been the response from AWS.

[00:07:21] John Jahnke: It's been great. Matt I spent some time with Matt and Chris and we talked about it. Obviously, they acquired a company called phoenix.ai this week, which is a storefront company.

[00:07:29] And it's great minds think alike. We actually, think AppDirect is a enterprise version of marketplace with lots of ways to do commerce. We'll connect the clouds into that and them having a storefront way for people to get started. I think there's gonna be tremendous compliments there.

[00:07:43] So in general. Really aligned visions Yeah. Is the feedback. And then, we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot in flight and, our discussions really have centered around how we can just not get distracted along the way. And I think we're laser focused on that.

[00:07:56] Chip Rodgers: Yeah.

[00:07:57] John Jahnke: Yeah.

[00:07:58] Chip Rodgers: Bert tell me about your customer [00:08:00] base then now having this, how do you think about this connection into the cloud?

[00:08:04] Emanuel Bertolin: Yeah. I think our customer base is ex is really happy because from their perspective, many of them have built marketplaces. They've onboarded a lot of products. And they've created, a great business with this marketplace. We will now work to develop a, let's call it a Tackle plugin that will give their marketplace.

[00:08:23] Exposure to the hyperscaler marketplaces. They, if they want to sell on AWS they'll be able to sell on AWS using that one catalog, one onboarding, one integration. And I think it's gonna be very powerful for all of our platform customers. And the real winner, in my opinion, are the ISVs.

[00:08:40] Chip Rodgers: Yeah,

[00:08:41] Emanuel Bertolin: because what an ISV integrates to Tackle or integrates to AppDirect is we build our bridge together. They'll have access to, obviously the hyperscaler marketplaces, they'll have access to a network of AppDirect marketplaces if they wanna sell through those. And then we also [00:09:00] operate a marketplace where we have 14,000 technology advisors that buy and draw services from there.

[00:09:06] So the amount of distribution that an ISV gets. Is pretty incredible if they partner with Tackle and after act. So I think I think this is gonna be exciting. We do have a lot of work to do, but our visions are very aligned and I think, both of us have talked about the fact that we really want to help ISVs, maximize their go to market and maximize their distribution.

[00:09:29] Our companies are very aligned in that focus. And this just amplifies that.

[00:09:34] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, go ahead John.

[00:09:35] John Jahnke: I was just gonna say, and we see like product-led growth has been a super hot topic this week. Yeah. And AI is forcing every company to rethink their business model for product-led growth. We think that enables more storefront marketplace connections.

[00:09:47] And I do think that's another element of this whole story for us. So how do we help people go on that journey? Not in the class, not just in the classic enterprise private offer way, but in this new kind of user discoverable way. So I think that, how we [00:10:00] help users find products will be all part of the story.

[00:10:03] Yeah.

[00:10:04] Chip Rodgers: So Bert, you were talk, just talking about 14,000 advisors . You also have about a thousand providers

[00:10:11] Help interpret that language. So advisors are,

[00:10:16] Emanuel Bertolin: so we have a community of technology advisors.

[00:10:18] Yeah. Many of them are MSPs consulting shops. Gotcha. And all of them have the ability to procure from the AppDirect marketplace and sell services through either a referral motion. Or a resell motion. And that, that community is just continually growing and it's generating a lot of opportunity for distribution, especially long tail distribution, which is a golden thing.

[00:10:42] Most people have solved, getting the head of distribution done. But the long tail is, has been a bit elusive for a lot of companies. And I think AppDirect has has a really good solution for the long tail.

[00:10:52] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. And so the providers then are ISVs. Are they also like the [00:11:00] telcos, energy companies?

[00:11:00] Emanuel Bertolin: Exactly. Yeah. We hardware we do have hard, we do have hardware. We have a lot of lifecycle management products. Expense management optimization products that our advisors can resell, so that they can help businesses optimize their entire tech stack everywhere. Everywhere from optimizing software spend to technology span to energy consumption.

[00:11:21] And that's all available through the abstract marketplace. Yeah.

[00:11:25] John Jahnke: Terrific.

[00:11:26] Emanuel Bertolin: Yeah.

[00:11:27] John Jahnke: John, any final thoughts? I mean that whole advisor network, I'm excited to connect the dots. 'cause a lot of people ask us, how do you help us generate demand? Like we're launching a new route to market, how do we get it going?

[00:11:37] How do we get this flywheel moving? I think being able to connect the buyer advisor side to the ISV side to drive some demand's gonna be a fun addition to the portfolio we've never had access to. So I'm excited about that.

[00:11:50] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Okay. Exciting. Thank you guys. Bert I appreciate you taking some time.

[00:11:56] John, thanks for taking, thanks, Chip, taking some time. Always good to see you and yeah, [00:12:00] likewise. What's on the agenda? It's Thursday afternoon. We're winding down. We do,

[00:12:03] John Jahnke: Tackle winds up re:Invent at Harrah's dueling piano bar every year. So we're gonna have some dinner and make our way there so it be a fun night.

[00:12:11] Chip Rodgers: That'll be fun. Looking forward to it.

[00:12:12] John Jahnke: Looking forward to it. Yeah.

[00:12:14] Chip Rodgers: Alright, thank you guys for joining and thank you all for joining as well. And we will see you next time. Remember to like, share and subscribe and see you next time. Thanks everybody. Thanks.

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