Acquisition gives customers a way to formalize management of non-traditional ‘shadow channel’ partners, the industry’s fastest growing segment

SALT LAKE CITY – Impartner, the fastest-growing and most-award winning pure-play Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, today announced it has acquired Amplifinity, the leader in referral partner management software, to help formalize management of emerging “shadow channel” partners, which are expected to explode in growth in the coming decade. By providing corporations with an intentional versus ad-hoc process for managing these increasingly critical relationships, companies see an average revenue increase of over 30 percent from these partners. The shadow channel of non-traditional partners has emerged because business unit buyers, who make 72 percent of purchasing decisions, increasingly turn to disparate groups such as industry-based consultants, service providers and independent software vendors to help implement technology given their role as trusted advisors.

“The shift in today’s partner landscape is tectonic,” said Joe Wang, Impartner CEO. “With factors such as changing business models due to SaaS companies and the shift to business unit buyers from IT, an increasingly omni-channel environment has emerged to serve the customer no matter how they reach out. The time is now to make sure we’re rounding out our technology with solutions like Amplifinity to help our customers bring the same process and structure we’ve brought to managing traditional partner models to managing and rewarding new types of partners in this changing channel landscape.”

Forrester’s Principal Analyst, Channel Partnerships and Alliances, Jay McBain, addressed the trend earlier this year in his Forrester blog, What I See Coming For The Channel In 2019. One of his 2018 predictions was that “vendors [will] put formal shadow-channel programs in motion,” wrote McBain, citing a vendor who has since replaced “its traditional, compliance-based programs with new performance-based programs designed to reward all types of partners, business models, and various customer technology consumption preferences…Most programs will follow suit in 2019.”

“This acquisition underscores that emerging partner groups have moved into the main stream mix for corporations everywhere and need to be managed as such,” said Amplifinity CEO Bill Weissman. “Traditional and non-traditional partners are the new normal for corporations everywhere, and by bringing our technology together with Impartner’s, customers now have a complete tool set to maximize their business relationship with every type of partner and accelerate revenue for everyone.”

The acquisition includes Amplifinity’s referral marketing software, which automates and formalizes the referral process for lead generation at scale and includes its incentive management technology and integrations to a suite of payment fulfillment providers to reward this new generation of partners in the manner they most prefer. Amplifinity’s team will remain in the company’s Ann Arbor, MI, offices, adding a Midwest team of developers to Impartner’s global Channel Innovation Labs, made up of engineers, data scientists, UX and UI professionals and channel strategists who are committed to providing future-proof channel management technologies and services that accelerate channel performance.

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