ChannelEyes LLC, a new social network for IT solution
providers and channel vendors is making its existence known this weekend at the
SMB Nation event in Las Vegas where founders will be handing out postcards
inviting channel players to sign up.
The new social network is expected to debut by the end of
this year and is billed as the “first free and secure social network to aggregate
channel program information.” It’s the creation of Bob Godgart, Autotask
co-founder, who recently resigned from his position leading that company to
start up this new one. Godgart is also
the chairman of CompTIA. The ChannelEyes network is intended to transform
communication between suppliers, channel partners, dealers and agents,
according to a statement issued by the organization to announce itself.
In discussions with hundreds of channel partners ChannelEyes
founders learned that only 5 percent use vendor portals and less than 17
percent open vendor emails.
“This is a big problem!” Godgart said in a statement. “ChannelEyes
is going to fix that. What Facebook did for collaboration among friends,
ChannelEyes will do for business.”
ChannelEyes has secured backing from “leading vendors,
associations and major VARS,” according to the organization, but stopped short
of naming them and instead promised announcements in the coming weeks.
“For all types of channel partners, ChannelEyes.com will be
the single place to see a snapshot of new channel information every day.
Partners can control the programs they need to follow, filter the information
they want to share and easily built conversations around it,” according to the
statement.
Godgart’s vision, he said, is to create a “ridiculously
simple and secure way to engage all channel partners.”
He is doing that with the help advisor, Jay McBain, who
resigned from Autotask in September and also with the help of ChannelEyes CTO
David Geoghegan.
“Business social applications go beyond simple sharing to
create an industry focused, secure environment where information is filtered
reaching the right person at the right time,” Geoghegan said.
ChannelEyes wouldn’t be the first organization looking to
create a social network for the channel. Others, including PartnerPedia have
created such networks. Xeequa was initially planned to do the same kind of
thing as ChannelEyes, but later morphed into Xeeme. And IBM recently announced
that it would effectively been shutting down its InfoBoom community for
midmarket customers and partners and moving the relevant content to the
appropriate social networks including LinkedIn.