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Last Thursday, November 20th, Avangate hosted our first networking event for the software publishing community in Silicone Valley.  All-in-all the event was a success and proved to be a great opportunity for members of the community to meet each other and interact in a social environment.  The Tied House Brewery, in Mountain View, CA served some fine food and drink, something that, and you can trust me on this, is necessary to make any networking event a success!

Our goal was to cross organizational borders and introduce constituents from all sides of the software publishing world outside the constraints of day-to-day business.  We had people from major software publishing and technology firms such as Intuit, Symantec and Phoenix Technologies mixing with service providers such as Acutrack, TrialPay, Nalperion and Uniloc.  We even had a few new friends from Google, Yahoo! and Ernst and Young join us.

I recently did a research on what software vendors are doing in order to sell through affiliates. I looked on over 400 websites that sell software. After putting all the data together, the first thing that stands out is that most of the vendors haven’t implemented the minimum requirements in order to affiliate efficiently.

Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.

Here are the key findings of my personal research:

• most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
• just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
• very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
• more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.

Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?

Join us for an informal gathering in Mountain View!

If you’ve met with one of the Avangate guys or gals, then you probably know that this year we worked hard. We attended lots of conferences, had presentations, booths and wrote a lot of white papers and other articles. But you should also know that we also like to play hard and relax with our friends and partners.

That’s why I’m happy to invite you at the Casual Drinks with Avangate - Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at the Tied House in Mountain View. It’s the perfect time to come meet the Avangate US team and schmooze with other people from the software business. The event will be hosted by Casey Potenzone, VP Sales, and Daniel Nicolescu, Business Development Manager.

Discovering the fan part of your partners and mingle with software people seems like having a good time to me. Or at least because it’s easier to explain what you do to people that talk the same business language like you do, it should be a relaxed, informal schmooze. Of course I also happen to know that Daniel is an excellent wine expert so it’s always nice to be around him at parties ;)

If it sounds like fun to you too, register now here.

On Friday a lot of new people made it to the ISDEF conference. In the morning we had a presentation about doing business with Nokia. Smartphone/PDA software might just be a good development area in the next years.

In the afternoon I had a round table with other eCommerce providers where we answered questions about the software/shareware industry.

We have discussed about the differences between the affiliates and resellers, mainly explaining that affiliates work best when you only need online sales and promotion, while the resellers are better for longer term business developments and offline distribution.

The next question that came up was about the conflict when both affiliates and the software vendors are bidding on the same AdWords keywords. While the positions expressed where very different, the conclusion was that some niche affiliates (especially if you are talking about local markets) might be able to do better AdWords and take advantage of the long-tail. So the decision to let affiliates do AdWords should really be based on efficiency.

Mountain View, California… this is the way press releases from Avangate US will begin from now on. But to reach this goal (i.e. the Silicon Valley office) there was (and will be from now on) a tremendous work to be done.

The first step was the Board decision on expanding US operations. Basically Avangate needed fresh blood in US land to feed a healthy business.

The business development itself it’s not a complicated process; you need someone that knows the industry, has good connections and is ready to dedicate a big part of his life to his job.

The business deployment is another story. You need someone inside the company who knows the business in all its details, knows the company culture and is also willing to involve himself in this operation. And that person was me :).

I bet that if you are reading the Avangate blog, you would love to hear how things are going around here. As head of the Avangate Marketing Department, I’m in the position to know a little bit about everything, which probably makes me the right person to talk about it.

Not sure if you know, but before starting Avangate, we were in the security business, with the RAV antivirus that we sold to Microsoft in 2003. And that included a lot of selling and marketing expertise we gathered during RAV’s 9 years. I know you might not perceive an eCommerce provider this way, but we are still in the business of selling software, just like you. In a way, everything that we’ve learned about selling software before applies here on a greater scale.

So, how does it feel to work for an eCommerce provider?