MaintenanceNet reaches more than $2 billion in maintenance contracts in Q2 30 July, 2007 By Vanessa Ho

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Scott Herron, CEO of MaintenanceNet, said that the main contribution to his company's success is the maturity in the industry's understanding and awareness of the challenges around managing the services business.

"As awareness grows, we are starting to pick-up a lot more customers who are interested in managing and growing their services revenues," said Herron. "Manufacturers have been talking for a long time about driving higher services and getting better at renewals."

MaintenanceNet differentiates its software as a service offerings by integrating data from multiple companies and multiple data sources along the supply and demand chain into a single, unified software application. The result is complete visibility into service contract management spanning manufacturers, channel partners, end customers and every touch point in between.

"Without data integrity and a way to share that information with partners, you are always going to be limited in overall opportunity. It really takes a full lifecycle approach to managing that business all the way from inception of the sale and making sure it is properly registered and have correct content and information around the maintenance contract ... over the life of that service contract," Herron said.

MaintenanceNet has been providing manufacturers, distributors and value-added resellers (VARs) alike with proven techniques and technologies for uncovering new service sales opportunities surrounding expiring service contracts, unattached assets (products sold without service agreements) and warranty and product registration. During the first half of 2007, the company continued on an aggressive business development path, securing a number of key customer wins including several of the world's leading technology manufacturers.

"The last two and half years we really been out educating the market and evangelizing this holistic approach in contract management and opportunities people were missing," Herron said.

He added that he recognized this systemic issue around managing maintenance contracts and in the past has worked with customers that had this inability to track internally what they had in terms of maintenance contracts.

"We believe in bringing in a new approach to post-sale activities which are managing the registration and renewal opportunities but also being able to help manufacturers do business on pre-sales, making it easier to manage and order services and some of the products that we are doing today to help partners make it very easy to do business with manufacturers," said Herron.

For the third quarter of 2007, Herron said MaintenanceNet's current forecast is on the upswing. He added that the company has big initiatives that have global implication. Herron explained that there are plans to find partners in Europe and expand in the Asia Pacific region.

"[This problem] is not secluded to the U.S., it is a global issue and compounded when outside of the US. When trying to do business in emerging markets like Europe and Latin America, it gets very complex around services."