Nitro sees partners as key to disrupting PDF solutions market

Digital document productivity solutions Nitro is strengthening its channel-first strategy with increased investment in its partner enablement, co-marketing, and sales incentives, empowering partners to accelerate growth.

The Australian-founded company was founded in 2005 said Asia Pacific (APAC) channel-driven revenue surged to 58 per cent year on year and wants to further expand its ecosystem to deliver cost-effective PDF and eSign solutions to businesses worldwide.

In an interview with ARN Michael Helder said the vendor has grown significantly over the past 20 years, transitioning from a perpetual-based offering to a subscription model around eight to ten years ago.

Initially targeting the SMB and mid-market spaces, Nitro now competes with Adobe and DocuSign, offering products at half the price with twice the value.

Helder said have a strong change management program and serve various industries, including financial services, universities, and government sectors.

Nitro emphasises improving employee experience and workflow efficiency, leveraging digital tools to streamline processes.

The vendor is also focusing on channel partnerships, providing attractive margins and free marketing support to resellers, aiming to displace incumbents and offer cost savings to customers.

“We started off in probably the SMB and mid-market space, said Helder. “Then we realised that there was this massive opportunity to compete with the bigger vendors.”

“We had to build a whole program, our Customer Success Program, around how we help big customers move from the incumbent to Nitro and manage that change to be painless and seamless.”

Currently Nitro has customer in financial services, universities, insurance, medical, health care, federal, state and local government, as well as defence and military operations.

“We have to tick a lot of boxes to be able to sell to those big organisations,” he said. “We’re in two of Australia’s top five banks and have basically thrown the incumbent out.

“We also moved into e-signing about eight years ago now, and that market has grown, and we’ve repositioned.”

A lot of the conversations Nitro has with customers is they want improve employee experience and a big part of that, Helder explained is by providing more people with more digital tools to complete more double tasks digitally.

“We talk internally to customers too, about stopping the print-sign-scan dance,” he said. “There’s still lots of businesses out there who email PDFs to people, and they print them out on a copier or laser printer, they sign them, they scan them, and they send them on.”

According to Helder the vendor is seeing a rapid transition across, large enterprises, large governments, lots of universities, like its customer the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

As for the channel, when Helder joined seven years ago Nitro was active in working with the channel.

“I’ve always said we need them more than they need us,” he said. “We need to be engaging with channel because they have the relationships with the customer and are the trusted advisor.

“The channel is very aware of who owns which contracts with which big customers, and if they haven’t got them, then their competitors are going after them pretty heavily.”

In Australia Nitro works with the “long tail of mid-market and SMB” partners, as well through distribution.

“But we deal directly with a lot of the big resellers ourselves and have got really strong relationships, and that business is just compounding and growing massively every year,” Helder said.

In March Nitro hosted its APAC Partner Advisory Board (PAB) bringing together partners and distributors across Australia, New Zealand, India, and Southeast Asia for a day of collaboration, strategy, and celebration.

Nitro CEO Cormac Whelan and Helder outlined Nitro’s growth strategy, partner-first initiatives, and competitive roadmap for 2025.

“Our partners are our boots on the ground, helping us expand our reach and deliver real value to customers across the region,” said Whelan. “Bringing them together creates a unique opportunity to listen and learn and strengthen our collaboration.

“Aligning on a shared vision ensures we will continue to drive success to customers and users alike in APAC.”