News & Updates

Unifying AppDirect and AppSmart to Unleash Accelerated Growth for Providers and Advisors

By Nicolas Desmarais / October 18, 2022

As I hope you’ve seen on our social media channels and in our newsroom, we reached a tremendous milestone today for our company and for the industry in announcing that we’re going to fully unify our AppSmart business under the AppDirect brand name. Until now, our provider and advisor customers have worked with us under two distinct brands—AppDirect for providers, and AppSmart for advisors. This unification won’t all happen at once, and we will be in regular communications over the next few months as we unify our websites, product brands, and programs.

Unifying the brand is in many ways the final step to connecting technology advisors, technology providers, and businesses into a single ecosystem. This was the original vision that Dan and I had 13 years ago and it’s why we chose the logo we did. In fact, the three-sided triangle has always represented the three sides of the B2B commerce ecosystem—businesses, technology advisors, and technology providers—that are essential to making technology universally accessible to businesses everywhere.

This follows important operational changes within AppDirect to fully integrate our operations, sales and marketing organizations to function as one team dedicated to making a phenomenal experience for our advisors and providers.

• Operations—We recently aligned all operations under Renée Bergeron, who has been appointed as our new Chief Operating Officer. Renée has been running our AppSmart business for the past three years and will continue to be responsible for delivering a great experience for all advisors, as well as the operations and experiences for providers and businesses.

• Sales—We also brought our provider and advisor sales teams together under Emanuel Bertolin, our new Chief Revenue Officer. His key mandate is to enable providers to expand their distribution opportunities and help advisors expand their offer and grow their market share through access to many new services including the ability to create marketplaces and sell platform services.

One brand, one ecosystem, unlimited opportunities

Originally, based on our deep belief that marketplaces were the future of B2B technology, we built the AppDirect commerce platform to help businesses create their own SaaS marketplaces and partner ecosystems. What became abundantly clear is that the biggest factor in determining whether a business successfully adopts and uses technology is whether they have access to the right technology advisor or partner to help them make the best solution choices. That’s why we created AppSmart, and it’s been hugely successful in its own right.

AppSmart today is one of the largest and fastest growing technology service brokerages in the United States, serving more than 10,000 partners and more than 100,000 end business customers, with a catalog that exceeds 1,000 products from more than 600 telecommunications, cloud and energy providers.

Now, we’ll have a huge opportunity to explode those numbers across theAppDirect subscription commerce ecosystem.

Creating a flywheel effect of growth and innovation

As we align under the AppDirect brand, we’re more committed than ever to delivering an optimal experience for our advisors. This benefits everyone:

• Business buyers will have access to thousands of knowledgeable advisors to help them make sound business choices among an even greater variety of products and services.

• Advisors will have more support than ever before from us, with more sales, marketing, and training resources. They’ll be able to sell services beyond the AppSmart catalog and bundle in additional services to provide exponentially more value for their customers. They’ll also be able to sell platform services and build their own marketplaces and ecosystems.

• Providers will have access to a virtual army of advisors to help them recommend their products, and they’ll be supported by one operations team, one sales organization, and one platform to help them grow and extend their business.

As we start to settle into the last quarter of the year and as we look forward to seeing how these changes unfold, I want to express my gratitude to our providers, advisors, and our customers, and to the entire team at AppDirect for your vital contributions to making the AppDirect ecosystem truly greater than the sum of its parts.

Read our press release for more information.