Facebook has a message for you, channel pros. Stop thinking of us a distraction for your employees, and start thinking of us as your newest cloud computing partner.
Indeed, the biggest name in consumer social media wants to become a leader in productivity software too by rolling out as many seats as possible of Workplace by Facebook, an ad-free, commercial version of the Facebook platform designed for private use as a communications and collaboration tool. To realize that objective in the SMB market, however, the company needs an army of trained and motivated partners. And that means you.
“This is a big focus for us,” says Geoff Perfect, global sales director for Workplace by Facebook.
As ChannelPro reported last month, SYNNEX is now the first U.S. distributor for Workplace. That agreement, however, is but an early step in a much more ambitious campaign on Facebook’s part that includes the forthcoming launch of a full-blown partner program.
Introduced in 2016, Workplace is a close replica of Facebook’s social networking service utilized by some 2.38 billion monthly active users worldwide as of March. Like the consumer site, the commercial one has a news feed, live video streaming, instant messaging, and more. Users can choose between a free version of the system with limited functionality and a fully-equipped premium version that sells for $3 per user per month.
Today, Workplace has over two million paid users globally, most of whom work for large enterprises. In fact, there are over 150 companies with 10,000 or more employees—including name brands like Starbucks, Walmart, Delta Airlines, and United Way—using the system presently.
“That’s not a traditional adoption profile,” observes Perfect. “In most SaaS companies, you start at the bottom end in the small-medium space and have to work your way up, but that’s not what we’ve seen.”
Instead, with momentum now established among big businesses, Facebook is ready to start working its way down into the SMB segment, with a particular eye on buyers in the 20-plus seat range that have lots of contingent employees, multiple locations, or both. Perfect points to a movie theater chain in Australia to illustrate why Workplace is a good fit for such businesses, noting that the company’s ticket takers, snack sellers, and other staff often work just a few hours a week.
“It’s very hard to get a sense of culture and connectedness across to those part-time employees,” he says. “You likely are not going to give them corporate email, and they probably don’t need to be collaborating on documents through [Microsoft] Teams, but you do need to communicate with them.” Workplace, Perfect continues, provides an efficient one-to-many tool for doing so.
“Within seconds of the CEO going live on a video, that part-time employee who might only work four hours a week or eight hours a week is actually listening, watching, and sort of feeling the entire culture of the company,” he says.
Workplace has two other things going for it as well, Perfect adds: It’s a “mobile-first” solution optimized for use on smartphones and a simple one for most people to learn. “Workplace looks and feels a lot like Facebook,” Perfect says. “The ease of adoption and usability is almost instantaneous.”
Conveying that message to millions of small and midsize companies, however, is a bigger job than Facebook has any interest in doing on its own. “It’s never been our goal at Facebook, at least in the group that we’re in, to build a monster direct sales team,” Perfect notes. “That’s just not in our DNA. What is in our DNA is to find great partnerships.”
Forging those partnerships is a top priority for Perfect, who joined Facebook some 18 months ago after eight years at Apple, including four as senior managing director of that company’s global, multi-billion-dollar SMB business. His strategy for attracting resellers is to emphasize the many ways partners can profit from Workplace, beginning with the recurring revenues they pocket on licensing fees. Though he won’t specify the exact margin partners collect from that annuity stream, Perfect calls it big enough to be worth a channel pro’s while.
“It’s healthy,” he says.
Moreover, just as Microsoft partners make money deploying and customizing Office 365, Facebook partners can profit from similar opportunities with Workplace. In particular, the system integrates with a wide range of third-party solutions spanning from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive to Salesforce, HubSpot, Cisco Webex, and Zoom. Helping end users capitalize on those connections, Perfect notes, is a potentially rich source of project income.
“There’s an ecosystem of opportunity wrapped around the platform,” he says.
Microsoft partners can safely sign onto that ecosystem without jeopardizing a critical vendor relationship, he continues. Though Workplace bears an obvious resemblance in some respects to Office 365 components like Teams and Yammer, Facebook views it as a complement to the Microsoft offering rather than a competitor.
“It’s our strong belief that those two products, Workplace and Office 365, are better together,” says Perfect, adding that the two platforms extend each other in powerful and, in the case of Workplace at least, necessary ways.
“We do not view Workplace as a standalone platform,” Perfect says, adding that a complete Workplace solution requires both the identity and access management capabilities provided by services such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory and the storage, workflow, and communication functionality offered by applications like SharePoint, Skype for Business, and OneDrive.
To make selling Workplace both easier and more attractive, Facebook plans to roll out what Perfect calls a “fairly traditional” and “fairly sophisticated” partner program. The company already has enablement documents and enablement specialists in place, as well as a growing team of channel partner managers. Market development funds and other benefits are coming soon.
Access to those resources, however, will initially be limited in the U.S. to a select set of SYNNEX resellers. “We want some people to work with us as we build this program out,” Perfect says.
Though SYNNEX is Facebook’s latest Workplace distributor, it may not be the last. The product is already available through U.K.-based Distology and Norway-based Crayon as well, and according to Perfect, deals with further companies are an open possibility.
“It’s clear that there are others in the market,” he says. “We are talking to them. We don’t have any announcement yet but, certainly, we’re thinking about others that we could add.”
