Dive Brief:
- AvePoint credited its partner network with helping drive double-digit revenue growth and boosting its software services segment to new highs, executives said Thursday, during a Q1 2026 earnings call.
- The data management and security platform provider saw SaaS revenue increase 35% year over year to $93.4 million as total revenue grew 26% to $117.2 million during the three months ended March 31.
- AvePoint’s channel footprint has grown in the nine months since it revamped its program last year. Channel transactions now account for roughly half of AvePoint’s recurrent business, according to CEO Tianyi Jiang. The volume of annual recurring revenue generated by partners in Q1 alone increased three percentage points to 58%, CFO James Caci added.
Dive Insight:
AvePoint’s pivot to the channel aligned with a broader industry trend, as vendors reworked partner programs with points-based incentives, performance tiering and technical support to drive midmarket growth.
“We do embrace channel-first strategy, especially in the medium to small customer segments,” Jiang said during the earnings call.
Channel partners dominate the small and midsized enterprise space, according to Omdia, a Channel Dive sister company. The analyst firm expects partners to capture more than three-quarters of IT spending in the SME segment this year, which includes over $700 billion in cloud and managed services and software.
As AvePoint expands its platform, it’s also eyeing upmarket channel opportunities, through regional and “even some bigger sized” systems integrators, Jiang added. The total addressable market for IT services will approach $1.9 trillion in 2026, per Gartner’s most recent spending forecast.
The AI goldrush is steering businesses to partners with deployment expertise and solutions that ease IT management and data security operations. AvePoint added Azure cloud-based data protection capabilities to its platform and expanded its channel ecosystem through an alliance with the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners in October. Last month, the company deployed AI agent controls and consolidated its IT management capabilities across applications, data, devices, tenants and cloud with managed service providers in mind.
“Our latest report conducted in partnership with Omdia … revealed that nearly half of MSPs want a complete platform integrated with other core tools and 91% say that integrating data backup and disaster recovery delivers stronger data governance than offering them separately,” Jiang said. “We saw this many times in Q1 with existing customers.”
Jaing touted AvePoint’s channel ecosystem as an efficiency driver, citing major cost reductions in sales and marketing.
“In July 2021, our cost of sales and marketing was 41% of our revenue — last quarter, it covered around 31%.” he said. “We credit the majority of that to our channel.”
