WorkSpan Snares $27M in Series B

WorkSpan, the first ever Ecosystem Cloud platform, today announced a collaboration with Microsoft enabling Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers to take advantage of the growing ecosystem of partners engaged in build-with, market-with, and sell-with motions to accelerate innovation and bring more valuable joint solutions to their customers through these go-to-market partnerships.

WorkSpan has completely reimagined how companies go to market together. For the first time, with the WorkSpan Ecosystem Cloud, alliance and ecosystem leaders are finally able to build-with, market-with & sell-with their ecosystem partners in a single, secure, cloud-based network to grow business & abundance together.

WorkSpan was named a Cool Vendor in Gartner's May 2019 Cool Vendors in Channel and Sales Enablement report, which states: "New indirect sales platforms enable technology and service providers (TSPs) to more effectively manage a more complex and distributed channel ecosystem, providing smoother coordination, fluid communication and timely sales intelligence." Gartner also includes WorkSpan as a Representative Vendor in the May 2019 Market Guide for Partner Relationship Management Applications report saying: "Partner ecosystem platforms are networks for organizations and their sales partners that support today's needs for multi-partner business processes to drive revenue across all stakeholders. Gartner anticipates that disrupting the current business models through building sales partner ecosystems will be a game changer."

In addition to longtime customers like SAP, SUSE, and Lenovo, in the last year, WorkSpan has added a number of industry leaders and ecosystem hubs including Microsoft, Google, Accenture, VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, and others. Forward-looking enterprises organize their modern partner programs around ecosystems to facilitate the dynamic and ever-evolving customer needs.

"WorkSpan has been excited to embark on this integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365," said Mayank Bawa, CEO and Co-Founder, WorkSpan, "Companies recognize that their ecosystems need to be actively managed for growth. Now, we look forward to bringing ecosystem management inside Microsoft Dynamics 365, enabling customers to manage and grow with their ecosystem partners in their respective markets."

"Ecosystem Cloud is an emerging capability that helps partners work together across company boundaries to drive greater revenue in true partner-to-partner motions," said Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President & One Commercial Partner Channel Chief. "WorkSpan has built an Ecosystem Cloud where now Dynamics 365 for Sales customers can leverage this capability to work collaboratively with their partners in bringing new solutions to market for their joint customers."

The integration between WorkSpan and Dynamics 365 enables an unprecedented level of collaboration and closer alignment of sales motions between Dynamics 365 customers' internal sales teams and partner teams. Sales teams have greater trust in their partner teams which leads to better sales velocity and increased revenues from partnerships. Only with WorkSpan Ecosystem Cloud, can enterprises orchestrate multi-partner and partner-to-partner sales motions, and deliver end-to-end offerings to enable the best customer experiences. This new integration gives Dynamics 365 customers:

Opportunities in Dynamics 365 that are seamlessly synced to WorkSpan. New partner opportunities (and opportunity products) and updates to these joint opportunities in Dynamics 365 are automatically synced to WorkSpan. In WorkSpan, enterprises can securely share critical opportunity data with partners and ensure that the right partner activities are triggered by sales stage.
Real-time view of the partner engagement and contribution, from within Dynamics 365. Sales teams in Dynamics 365 will be able to see a view of the progress of the joint opportunity in WorkSpan. They can also see the partner activities and contribution on the deal, for instance – customer meetings, development of collateral and PoC, and engage directly with the partner teams to accelerate the deal.
WorkSpan also announces the company has raised $27 Million in a Series B funding. This funding round was led by Redline Capital in London with participation by Mayfield, who led the Series A round as well as new investor M12 Ventures (previously known as Microsoft Ventures).

"WorkSpan has created a solution that is category-defining in an industry that has been ripe for disruption," said Nicolas Giuli, Partner at Redline Capital, "The WorkSpan Ecosystem Cloud platform has been attracting major brands in the high tech space to grow their ecosystem participation on the WorkSpan network."

"We are thrilled to expand on our original investment in WorkSpan," said Navin Chaddha, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund, "It's been exciting to see WorkSpan transforming the industry, growing from our days as an early investor. We have complete confidence in the team WorkSpan has assembled to continue to deliver on these major opportunities in the market."

"WorkSpan makes it easier to build, market and sell together, changing the dynamic in building active and engaged ecosystems of partners," said Leo de Luna, Managing Director at M12. "With this investment, M12 is excited to continue the company's ongoing commitment to help the hundreds of thousands of partners in the Microsoft partner ecosystem grow business."

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About WorkSpan
WorkSpan has completely reimagined how companies go to market together. For the first time, with the WorkSpan Ecosystem Cloud, alliance and ecosystem leaders are finally able to build-with, market-with & sell-with their ecosystem partners in a single, secure, cloud-based network to grow business & abundance together. WorkSpan makes it easy to work across partner types and partner tiers to grow ecosystem value by driving joint revenue, entering new markets, accelerating time-to-market, innovating on new solutions to meet shared customer needs and developing trust across company boundaries. WorkSpan is a privately held company backed by Mayfield and is growing its network of global enterprise customers including SAP, Cisco, Microsoft, Accenture, VMware, NetApp, Nutanix, NTT Data, Lenovo, and others.