The New Beauty Game

Novell's plan this year is to reduce the number of Platinums from 215 to 75, before eventually raising the number back to around 150. For those who have been loyal partners of the Provo, Utah-based networking and consulting company for more than a decade, the news will come as a shock. For others, it will mean little as they already have reduced their involvement with the company to a bare minimum.

What makes the change newsworthy is not so much what Novell is doing--many vendors systematically prune back the number of partners they have only to grow their bases back up--but how and why the company is making the change. Rather than base Platinum authorization solely on an objective metric, such as sales volumes or number of certified personnel employed, Novell is making membership in its Platinum-level program on an invite-only basis.

That's right: It's a beauty contest. And it's not only at Novell, where looking your best has never mattered more than it does now. In case you haven't noticed, there's a revolution going on inside partner programs today. Fewer vendors are basing membership on sales, especially in the coveted higher levels, where benefits get better the higher you go. For years, that has been the de facto yardstick by which companies have been measured, as well as the number of certified people a company employs. But in this new era of solutions-selling and influence-peddling, those standard measures simply don't capture who is doing what to help move products around in the market.

Almost two years ago, Cisco realized this and switched its entire program from one based on volume to one based on value. Today, top status is achieved not by blowing out products, but by securing "specialization" certification in specific product and solutions areas. The company purports to be the only one in the industry whose program is based on value, but getting there wasn't easy. Paul Mountford, vice president of partner sales at Cisco, says the company's partners thought Cisco was mad when it first proposed making a change to its program.

"The huge pain was converting the contracts and the big players who were doing huge volumes, and getting them to accept that they were going to be treated the same way as a regional VAR in Chicago," he says.

Mountford likens making the change to fighting antibodies resident in the channel community. But Cisco did it anyway. Now other vendors are looking to transform their programs and adopt software measures as ways to distinguish their partners from one another.

Among other things, vendors are looking at the quality of customers VARs cater to, the types of vertical solutions they provide, the quality of engineers they employ and the level of technical expertise they provide. As in the case of Sun, they are also rewarding loyalty for not representing other vendors, and the ability to influence the sale of specific products. Sun, in fact, is expanding its successful StorageElite program to other product categories. Soon, you can expect several vendors to tie authorization to customer satisfaction, which they are now measuring with increased frequency.

On the surface, those measures might appear to be objective. But in practice, they won't universally be. Take partner satisfaction: You can expect there to be significant debates between partners and vendors when third parties begin measuring how satisfied your customers are using methodologies created without your input.

Alas, that's the future the industry is moving toward. So get used to it. Life in the channel is going to be a beauty contest. And you're going to be judged accordingly. My recommendation is to call your local vendor representative, if you haven't already. Invite that person over and explain everything your company does to help achieve his or her company's goals.

If your office isn't up to snuff, make it a lunch meeting in a nearby restaurant. And don't forget to wear your best.