Dive Brief:
- AI speech transcription company Otter.ai named Mike Barnes as head of partnerships and alliances to build the company’s first partner program, the company announced Thursday.
- Barnes and his team will recruit partners and establish “early lighthouse partnerships” in their first phase before implementing enablement, training and go-to-market efforts with the channel. The company will work with resellers, managed service providers, consultants, distributors, system integrators and referral partners.
- The firm is making a go-to-market push, having filled its CRO slot in March with Kenny Scannell, prior to Scannell departing the company in July. The partner program is Otter.ai’s first formal channel motion. “This is really the first foray,” Barnes told Channel Dive. “There's already the foundation of a lot of good integration partners that we have, but we’re going to take the next step for the company and for our vision.”
Dive Insight:
Barnes, who previously led the channel program at SaaS provider Gainsight, will help Otter.ai expand its footprint with businesses. Its notetaking application is a personal favorite among consumers and individual workers — some 35 million professional’s per Otter’s announcement — but Otter.ai wants corporations to use it as a conversational knowledge engine.
“It was more heavily skewed to the individual, from the foundation of the company up into the last couple years,” Barnes said. “It now is about a 50-50 split in terms of where we're seeing in usage, but where we're seeing growth and what we're expecting is much more on the enterprise side of things moving forward.”
Otter builds on a strong foundation of partnerships with independent software vendors. Its key ISV partners over the years have included conferencing firm Zoom and collaboration firm Slack, and the company recently lined up MCP servers to integrate with LLM builders. Barnes said MSPs, consultants and distributors have pent-up demand for Otter’s solution.
“Folks wanted to bring Otter to their ecosystems, to their users, to their memberships,” Barnes said. “In my couple months here already, I've been able to surface a few of those in very short order, and a bunch more that the rest of the team has quickly relayed and forwarded my way.”
Channel partners have been selling notetakers and conversational AI, but often as an add-on , according to Barnes. Moreover, other SaaS providers are more likely to bundle transcription into their package than MSPs and resellers selling it themselves.
“There's been more of a partner play for bundling or attaching and reselling a solution as part of a broader tool,” he said.
Barnes said the requirements for enterprise-grade security and permissioning will demonstrate Otter.ai's importance’as a standalone platform to partners.
“We're not just a lightweight add-on that's being tacked on as part of a line item,” Barnes said. “We're going to be something that's going to allow folks to recoup and sell through a channel because there's true value in it.”
Otter.ai has styled itself as more than a notetaker, stressing the engine where its transcripts land. The company aims to demonstrate its value in collecting intelligence from meetings and calls across a wide variety of platforms. It’s also able to push information to CRMs, project management tools and knowledge bases.
“With companies that have 15 different note takers showing up on calls, you're sending information to 15 different places, but I think that that lends itself into how Otter can infuse any third-party product or companies that we're working with,” Barnes said.
