News & Updates

A Unified AppDirect—Where B2B Commerce Happens

By Ideas @ AppDirect / January 23, 2023

We’re thrilled to announce that as of today, we’ve unified the AppSmart brand under the AppDirect name. This means that after four years of growing our advisor business distinctly from AppDirect under the AppSmart name, we now serve all of our customers under the AppDirect brand.

This change represents a momentous milestone for AppDirect and our customers. For years we’ve been building an ecosystem that’s redefined how software products are sold and bought. Today, our subscription commerce platform powers more than 1,000 providers, 10,000 advisors and 5 million subscribers with thousands of cloud, telecom, energy, and other solutions that simplify how they do business. Combining the strengths of both sides of our company simplifies how we do business with all of our customers, and exponentially increases the value we can deliver.

We’ve made great strides since October when we first announced our intention to unify our brands.
 

New features and a one-click dashboard for advisors

We recently launched a unified experience for advisors that gives them one-click access from a single dashboard to every type of service offering—cloud, telco, and energy. This level of integration is unique in the industry and it simplifies advisors’ ability to cross-sell services and create solution packages that deliver the ideal technology stack for their customers.

From their dashboard, advisors can also quickly access all the tools and information they need to manage quotes and commissions and the back-end tools where they can create customer quotes and proposals.

With customers under more pressure than ever to make sound decisions about their technology, making it easier for advisors to procure and manage solutions through a unified AppDirect ecosystem will give them more choices and the ability to make even better technology recommendations to their customers.

Better tools and new routes to market for providers

The 1,000 providers who offer their services on our platform include software companies, cloud vendors, telecommunications and other technology providers. They form the backbone of our catalog, the most diverse in the B2B commerce industry.

For many technology providers, maximizing the success of their products by reaching new markets is essential, but costly. They need to ensure that they have the right channel mix. Making more of their products available to advisors on the AppDirect marketplace will give providers greater access to our virtual sales force of technology advisors and put their products in the hands of new customers who were previously difficult to reach.

An updated logo to represent our unified brand

You’ll notice a subtle but important change in our logo. The three-sided triangle has always represented the three sides of the B2B commerce ecosystem—businesses, advisors, and providers. With this update, we've unified them to represent the interconnectedness between these elements and the significance of the relationships that have built the ecosystem powered by AppDirect.

Other changes you'll notice now

If you’re an advisor and have been following us on our AppSmart LinkedIn page, that page has been renamed AppDirect for Advisors and is now nested within the AppDirect LinkedIn page. But you don’t need to change anything, and the content you’ve enjoyed will remain as is and continue to expand and evolve. Be sure to check the page often for news, insights, podcasts, blogs, events information, registration links, and much more.

We’ve also added advisor-specific content to our AppDirect website that provides all the information and resources you need to become an advisor or to run your existing advisor business, including:

• Our advisor signup page

• Self-service tools you need to manage and run your advisor business

• How to unlock capital to help you expand your recurring revenue

Although the AppSmart website will remain accessible, it will not be updated and will be deprecated in May.

Login in and support

Starting today, update your bookmarks! Your marketplace login URL will be updated with the AppDirect domain, changing from marketplace.appsmart.com to catalog.appdirect.com. If you log in using the old URL, it will automatically redirect you, but we recommend that you update your bookmarks and start using the new URL.

You’ll notice that some of the tools in your Workspace have new names that are aligned with our updated branding. These changes are all intuitive. For example, the Provider Commission Rates was previously called AppSmart Commission Rates.

If you’re an advisor, the email addresses you use to create support tickets will be updated to reflect the AppDirect domain. Emails sent to the old email addresses will redirect, but we encourage you to start using the new ones to ensure you have uninterrupted access in the event the redirects are removed at a later date. Following are the new email addresses:

• orders@appdirect.com

• cable@appdirect.com

• quotes@appdirect.com

• cloudquotes@appdirect.com

For more information, read our press release and be sure to check out our unified AppDirect LinkedIn page.