Brainshark Expands International Footprint Through Distribution Partnership With ICT123

WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Brainshark, Inc., the leader in cloud-based business presentations, today announced a partnership with ICT123, a leading distributor of IT and telecommunications solutions. Through the partnership, ICT123 is now selling and supporting Brainshark's suite of products, including Brainshark On-Demand, the Brainshark Content Portal and SlideShark Team Edition, across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. The partnership extends Brainshark's global footprint across Asia-Pacific, while providing ICT123's world-class customer base with solutions for improving mobile presentations, communications and productivity.

(Logo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120402/NE79983LOGO)

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, ICT123 helps local resellers combine telecommunications with IT to deliver more productive solutions to customers and create new revenue streams. ICT123 provides products and services from Telstra, Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company, along with other vendors such as Apple, Microsoft and many more.

With a focus and expertise in mobile solutions, ICT123 can now – through its partnership with Brainshark – better support its network of resellers in helping companies derive more value from their mobile investments. Brainshark's cloud-based technology makes it easy to create, share and track online video presentations – which can be viewed anytime, on-demand, and are automatically optimized for the mobile device accessing them. With the workforce increasingly mobile and as trends like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) continue to take hold, companies use Brainshark On-Demand to deliver high-impact sales, marketing, training and customer communications – which can be accessed immediately and conveniently, no matter what device the recipient is on. Brainshark's portal solutions are likewise optimized for computers, smartphones and tablets, and provide permissions-based access and content management capabilities.

"Working with ICT123, we're glad to offer Brainshark's solutions to our customers," said Ian Tennent, director, Phase3 Solutions, Inc., which provides technology, consulting, professional services and hosted monitoring across the U.S., Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. "Our customers find Brainshark very easy to use, and it helps them improve the penetration and retention of their communications. It is rare to find a customer who doesn't have an immediate need for this."

In preparation for launching Brainshark's products to its reseller network, ICT123 worked with a number of customers directly. One such customer is Nine Network – a top-rated television broadcaster in Australia, and part of Nine Entertainment Company – which recently purchased SlideShark Team Edition. The business version of Brainshark's SlideShark app, SlideShark Team Edition  addresses PowerPoint's incompatibility on the iPad – enabling iOS users to view and present decks the way they were meant to be seen: with fonts, animations, graphics, hyperlinks and videos intact. SlideShark Team Edition also serves as a platform for distributing, tracking and managing presentations in the cloud.

"Our sales team is equipped with iPads, yet we've always relied on PowerPoint to build presentations. So we were facing a big challenge: How could staff use their iPads to deliver presentations to advertisers, without having to rebuild all the content for iOS?" said Warwick Sharp, group sales operations manager for Nine Network. "We were thrilled when ICT123 introduced us to SlideShark Team Edition to solve this problem. Not only can reps show PowerPoint presentations, professionally and intact, from their iPads, but our organization can also easily distribute decks and make sure – as we constantly update and perfect our pitches – that everyone has instant, intuitive access to the most current copies."

To view a two-minute video presentation with more information from Sharp on Nine Network's use of SlideShark Team Edition, including benefits achieved, please see http://bit.ly/bsk-nine-entertainment-testimonial.

Ben O'Leary, CEO of ICT123, noted that the partnership with Brainshark has been well-received by the resellers and customers he works with.                                                                         

"We're always looking to help companies improve their mobile communications by offering new, exciting and useful solutions," O'Leary said. "Brainshark complements our existing services and helps us add more value to mobile offerings – in a way that our resellers and end customers benefit from. In addition, because we offer both Apple and Microsoft products, being able to provide SlideShark Team Edition to bridge the PowerPoint-on-iPad gap has met an important customer need."

Bob Bristol, vice president of channel sales at Brainshark, said: "We're pleased to work with a premier distributor like ICT123 to help Brainshark expand into new markets and be our trusted, local presence. We look forward to helping ICT123's customers communicate more conveniently and effectively with Brainshark's solutions for both on-demand and live mobile communications."

About ICT123
ICT123's innovative distribution channel brings telecommunications, IT and the cloud together, enabling companies to improve their productivity and business OOMPH. Products from some of the world's leading brands like Telstra, Microsoft and Brainshark are coupled together with the products, services and support of ICT123's channel partners to ensure customers are delivered a complete productivity solution. For more information, please see www.ict123.com.au.

About Brainshark, Inc.
Brainshark enables companies to improve productivity with cloud-based business presentation solutions for sales, marketing and training. With Brainshark's easy-to-use solutions, customers transform static documents such as PowerPoints into dynamic, mobile-ready content that can be accessed quickly and viewed as on-demand video presentations or presented live – anytime, anywhere. They can also measure the effectiveness of their communications in ways never thought possible and use these insights to take action. Thousands of companies – including half of the Fortune 100 – and millions of individuals rely on Brainshark to increase the impact and reduce the cost of their business communications. Learn more at www.brainshark.com.

SOURCE Brainshark, Inc.