Six ways to sell through a partner instead of direct: referral, cloud marketplace, reseller, systems integrator, embedded technology, and OEM. Which one you need comes down to two things: who sets the price to the end customer, and who holds the end user contract.
Short answer: in a software OEM agreement you cannot grant your customers more rights than your own upstream license gives you. So spell out exactly what rights survive termination. A case where SAP was sued under an OEM agreement makes the point. Here are three things every software company can
Referral, reseller, distributor, or OEM. Sales usually names the deal before anyone maps the money, and that is how a reseller relationship ends up papered as a referral. Three questions sort it out: who pays you, who signs the end user, and who provisions the service.
Short answer: a software referral agreement lives or dies on three things: exactly which referrals you pay on, how and when you pay, and whether both your partner and your own sales team can understand it. Get those right and most referral disputes never happen. While there are many different
Short answer: your SaaS reseller agreement or channel contract should address trademark use directly — a reseller can use your brand in its Google ads under the nominative-fair-use doctrine, but only if the product is actually for sale on the landing page and the ad does not imply a false
The 2007 Leegin decision overturned 96 years of law, so software vendors can now influence what distributors and resellers charge, in certain situations and within antitrust limits.
Short answer: if you let a partner, reseller, or OEM use your trademark without a written license and without exercising real quality control, you can be found to have naked licensed the mark, and the penalty is losing it entirely. The fix is simple: a trademark license with quality control
Get started with a free initial consultation. Fill out the form below to connect with our experts today!