Surviving And Thriving

Scott Nesbitt was a big fish in a small pond.

Among the elite resellers in Siebel's limited partner program, he and his staff at Tier 1 Innovation could make waves with a comment here, a phone call there. He had access, authority and power. He had juice.

All of that was poised to change last year when Oracle swam up and swallowed Siebel and all of its channel partners. In an instant, Nesbitt found himself one of thousands of like-sized partners clamoring for recognition in a partner program that dwarfed anything he'd been involved in previously.

"It certainly is a large ocean to play in," says Nesbitt of Oracle's partner universe. "We saw it coming and knew there would be challenges in the new relationship. The day after it was announced, we huddled and figured out a plan. We knew we had to embrace this."

Nesbitt's team was staring down a sea change that affects more and more VARs. Whether it's Oracle's purchase of Siebel and PeopleSoft; Hewlett-Packard's assumption of Compaq and Mercury Interactive, OuterBay and AppIQ; the IBM buyout of FileNet or EMC's acquisition of Documentum and RSA Security, solution providers are increasingly asked to move from the comfortable confines of a smaller partner program into the realm of a mega-program. So how does a VAR like Tier 1 maintain a visible profile in an age of increasing vendor consolidation?

"Continue to do what you did that got you to the position you were in with any other partner program," suggests Doug Kennedy, vice president of worldwide alliances and channels at Oracle. "You must already have a strong adviser's role. You have to maintain that."

Karen James vowed to do just that when her company's relationship with Compaq got swept up in the wash surrounding Hewlett-Packard's buyout of the PC maker. "We were at the top of Compaq's list and became very small when mixed in with HP partners," says James, the CEO of GeminiTech, a Waipahu, Hawaii-based VAR. "The key for us to make the transition and maintain our high level of standing was to be visible during the transition. In our case, HP held CEO meetings and Webinars at its new facilities, and we made sure we attended.

"When the new sales teams came to town, we made sure that we developed personal relationships with the new teams and showed them that we would drive business into their pipeline," James says. "Any large manufacturer sales team will make you a go-to partner if it knows you're paying attention to its bottom line. We made sure that the new guard got to know us by name and face."

Nesbitt followed the same course. He got on Oracle's radar early, making plans to attend his first Oracle World conference on the day the Siebel acquisition was announced. Tier 1 has sent a steady stream of its employees to Oracle training sessions. Nesbitt has also made a point of meeting with every Oracle regional vice president in the areas in which Tier 1 does business. "It was definitely our strategy to stay active," he says. "We knew that to survive and thrive in this new environment, we needed to get in the forefront."

"You can either be a successful part of the transition or complain about it," James adds. "The final part of our success in this situation was to actually make our numbers."

NEXT: Leveraging larger resources