CircleCI Opens AWS Marketplace Channel with Tackle Leading to 452% Growth

Tackle is Key to CircleCI's AWS Marketplace Growth

Executive Summary

CircleCI, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that delivers a continuous integration platform, saw the writing on the wall as its customers began changing the way they buy software. Carving out a presence on AWS Marketplace was key. By engaging Tackle, CircleCI navigated the AWS Marketplace integration and provided a solution to customers who wanted a simplified procurement process. Using Tackle to manage and drive its AWS Marketplace deals, CircleCI has seen revenue from that channel go from zero to 10 percent of its overall business revenue.

Customers demand an easier, faster way to buy SaaS

CircleCI’s customers run the gamut from large Fortune 500 companies to smaller SaaS startups, yet they share similar procurement challenges.

At the enterprise level, it can take several months or more to set up CircleCI as a new vendor. While resellers can alleviate this procurement hurdle, many smaller SaaS companies are moving away from resellers and prefer to work with vendors directly. Searching for a better process, CircleCI customers of all sizes determined cloud marketplaces were their procurement vehicle of choice. “We were experiencing some headaches with the new vendor approval processes,” said Larenzo Goodman, Senior Manager, Resellers, Cloud Alliances and Marketplace Partnerships at CircleCI. “Meanwhile, marketplaces were becoming the go-to mechanism for procurement because customers commit a cloud spend and the more they spend, the larger discount they get. We’ve seen a lot of our customers look across their stacks to see what they can obtain through a marketplace to increase their cloud spend.”

 

Tackle simplifies procurement and CircleCI nets 185% ROI

To deliver on customers’ demand for easier procurement, CircleCI engaged Tackle. The first task was listing CircleCI on AWS Marketplace and setting up a complex integration, which only took Tackle 48 hours. From there, Goodman and his team looked for other ways Tackle could help them drive channel growth. To date, Tackle has helped CircleCI develop stronger co-sell relationships with AWS sellers, streamline the auditing process, and scale its marketplace business. In just 12 months, CircleCI has seen its AWS Marketplace revenue grow by 452 percent.

Having Tackle not only led to more deals via AWS Marketplace, but it’s also enabled savings on the engineering side. Goodman estimates the total return on investment (ROI) for Tackle has been 185 percent. “If we didn’t use Tackle, we’d need three engineers to support the AWS Marketplace,” Goodman said. “With Tackle I don’t have to ask engineering to make simple adjustments. It makes my life a million times easier.”

 

CircleCI expands co-selling deals with AWS partners

After proving that AWS Marketplace held tremendous promise to execute new deals, CircleCI put more resources into developing co-selling relationships with AWS partners. “We even started to hire people to support the different functions of our AWS relationships and our co-selling efforts,” Goodman said. The result? Now CircleCI participates in lead-generation campaigns that net thousands of leads per year, which feeds an AWS Marketplace pipeline of up to 100 deals at any given stage.

“We’re seeing a lot more customers coming from that direction, and they ultimately end up transacting in the AWS Marketplace,” Goodman said.

Aggregated reporting makes audit prep easier

In addition to growing deals, Tackle has also simplified financial reporting for CircleCI’s internal teams. “Tackle provides complete visibility into our AWS Marketplace transactions for our revenue teams, our deal desk, and finance,” Goodman said. “Now we’re all looking at the same information through a single pane of glass, versus creating our own reporting and reporting systems.” This cohesion was especially important as CircleCI geared up for an audit. As a late-stage growth company, CircleCI needs to have its financial reporting ready for the potential of an IPO, and Tackle made it easy to have the right documents ready. Instead of CircleCI spending time building Salesforce or NetApp integrations, the company used Tackle to export relevant financial information about its AWS Marketplace business. Tackle also produces deal confirmations when Salesforce opportunities are closed, which ensures CircleCI has the necessary documents for an audit.  

CircleCI gets ready to scale with Tackle for the largest quarter yet

With benefits for its customers and its internal teams, CircleCI has big plans for Tackle as they scale. “Eventually we’ll run our whole marketplace business out of Tackle,” Goodman said. “We’ll get away from our reps managing their own private offers ourselves, and instead have Tackle take care of that for us so we can really scale our business.” Thus far, Goodman sees the success of Tackle as only the beginning. “We haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of customers who want to transact on AWS Marketplace,” Goodman said. “Thanks to Tackle, we’re having our largest quarter of AWS Marketplace opportunities by both volume and dollars—and I only expect that to increase.”

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CircleCI provides a software delivery engine and platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery for companies to accelerate innovation and growth.