Eight Insights from Tech Data's TechSelect Spring 2016 Partner Conference

As ChannelPro reported last week, ConnectWise partners can now purchase Microsoft Office 365 licenses through Tech Data directly from within ConnectWise’s CloudConsole SaaS management and billing tool.

“Tech Data is certainly one of the bigger players in the market and that’s why our customers really wanted to see that integration and that buying story through them,” says Gavin Gamber (pictured), vice president of channel sales and alliances at ConnectWise.

However, according to Stacy Nethercoat, vice president of Tech Data Cloud for the Americas, further and more ambitious integrations will be arriving as soon as the next few months.

“That’s actually a phase one,” she says of the CloudConsole announcement. “We’ve got some additional phases planned in the future to continue to really tighten up the experience for those partners.”

Users of ConnectWise’s PSA solution, for example, will soon have access to order tracking information from Tech Data’s databases directly within the ConnectWise PSA solution, as well as purchasing data they can use to measure client profitability more easily and accurately. Similarly, users of ConnectWise’s Quosal platform will soon be able to populate new quotes automatically—not to mention more quickly and accurately—simply by entering a Tech Data quote number.

Moreover, Nethercoat says ConnectWise isn’t the only vendor Tech Data is working with on such integrations. Partners of Boston, Mass.-based Carbonite Inc. have been able to buy additional licenses for their customers without leaving the Carbonite management interface since last year, for instance.

“We find that increasingly demand is more and more real time, and you’ve got to have automation to make that happen,” Nethercoat says. “As we add more vendors and ISVs to our line card, we will always be automating.”