TeamViewer is a thoroughly familiar name among most channel pros. The vendor’s remote access and support applications have been go-to help desk options for many years.
What’s probably less well known, however, is just how far beyond remote access TeamViewer’s product line now extends. These days, the vendor’s portfolio includes an RMM solution, a ticketing tool, a videoconferencing system, and an online sales and customer engagement platform.
More strategic still, from TeamViewer’s perspective, are the augmented reality capabilities it’s added in the last 18 months through its acquisitions of vendors Ubimax, Upskill, and Viscopic. That technology is not only featured in the company’s remote access software now but also powers new offerings like Frontline, an AR-enabled platform for creating customized “deskless worker” solutions for warehouses, factories, field service personnel, and more.
“I’m deeply convinced with these end-to-end business solutions is where you unlock value for everybody, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” says Robert Thiele, who became TeamViewer’s vice president of strategic alliances and partners for the Americas last September.
Alliances announced last year with SAP and Google, which is working with TeamViewer on retail industry solutions incorporating its Google Glass smart glasses, are aimed at accelerating the solutions push, an initiative that targets small businesses as well as big ones. “It’s not just limited to large-scale enterprise immersive technology companies,” says Patty Nagle, TeamViewer’s president for the Americas since last May. “The mom and pop shop can benefit as well.”
To realize its AR ambitions, however, TeamViewer needed a whole new go-to-market strategy optimized for delivering business solutions, rather than shrink-wrapped products, via partners. That’s one reason TeamViewer brought Nagle on board. In her previous role as CMO of OpenText she led a channel organization responsible for nearly half of the company’s sales, which totaled more than $3 billion in the 2021 fiscal year. The chance to help another company produce similar results was part of why Nagle switched jobs.
“One of the key attractors to coming over to TeamViewer, frankly, was where they were headed from a partnering point of view,” Nagle says.
Together, Nagle and Thiele are building an entirely new solutions-oriented sales model. Core elements of that effort have included merging previously separate channel and sales units into a single organization responsible for collaborative deal-making, and arming the group with new function-specific teams.
“There’s dedicated marketing, there’s dedicated technical support, dedicated strategy development,” Nagle says. As a result, she adds, channel account managers who once performed most of those roles themselves now have more bandwidth for business planning with the partners they support.
Recruiting partners with solutions expertise is an ongoing priority for Nagle and Thiele, along with encouraging existing resellers of TeamViewer’s remote access software to become AR solution providers.
“There’s an opportunity to land and expand,” Thiele notes. “They can tap into the value of the entire portfolio rather than selling what they know.” Not all of TeamViewer’s resale partners, he concedes, will ultimately take advantage of that opportunity. “The fact that we added additional market segments and additional product capabilities doesn’t mean that it fits for everybody,” he says.
That’s just fine by TeamViewer though, Nagle adds, noting that despite all the recent emphasis on AR, remote access remains a large and vital market for the company, which added biometric authentication functionality to its remote access toolset last year along with enhanced support for Apple devices via an alliance agreement with Jamf.
“As long as you have device proliferation, as long as you have security requirements, as long as you want to mitigate shadow IT, you’re going to need tools like what was classically developed and provided by TeamViewer,” Nagle says. “We still see opportunity for growth there on many fronts.”
