ActionBase enters North American market with channel program launch 4 February, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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Focused on the Israel market until recently, ActionBase is launching its channel partner program in Europe, Asia and in North America. Although the company started out with direct sales, it is now completely channel sales-oriented.

The company's technology focuses on tying together e-mail and documents into action items that can be tracked and monitored by participants and managers. For instance, an e-mail sent in Outlook that was flagged with the ActionBase plugin as an action item would then become an e-mail in all participants' folders that gave the history and status of the item. The plugin can be used in both Outlook and Word, so even documents themselves can be flagged as action items.

"We see this as a way to handle your unstructured, ad hoc processes ... that you really want to have managed because they're important to the business but you don't want to put too much structure on because people won't use the systems," said Jacob Ukelson, CTO of ActionBase.

For the end-user, flagging something as an action item is as simple as clicking an icon in Outlook or Word. From them on, ActionBase's software will do the tracking of the item for the end-users. It's meant to be as natural as sending an e-mail to someone, Ukelson said.

The new partner program has been divided into three tiers. Selected Partner is the entry-level tier and will mostly be made up of small and large solution providers that have a need for software like that from ActionBase, said Dalit Siegmann, marketing manager of ActionBase.

Premier Partners and Premium Partners are those that make a commitment of effort, investment and sales, she said.

"We are also looking for what we call technology partners and consultants," Siegmann said. She noted that the compliance market is also a big market for ActionBase because it has a need for a tracking system like ActionBase's software.

Ukelson said ActionBase is looking for channel partners that already have businesses around deploying customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. ActionBase's software can be used as an additional value-add on top of CRM and ERP applications, he said.

"Any channel reseller that works with those kinds of tools, we feel they would also benefit from selling ActionBase as an extension to those customers," he said.

With only five channel partners so far, ActionBase hasn't yet signed any partners in North America.

"I believe that we will need different partners for different verticals. We're also looking to focus on the oil and gas vertical, as well as the energy market and manufacturing," Siegmann said.