Training Muscles Beyond Tech Certification

As solution providers continue to evolve from box-movers to service providers, the training that IT vendors offer them is evolving as well. Many are expanding their educational offerings to include business development, system design, solution selling and even basic business skills, such as financial planning and business-plan development.

One thing that hasn't changed, however, is the grumbling by solution providers over how much training and certification cost in fees, travel expenses and lost business opportunities.

"To charge for general training is completely absurd," says Michael Oh, CEO of Heavy Water, a New Rochelle, N.Y.-based solution provider that designs, implements and manages IT networks. "Is it another revenue stream for [manufacturers], rather than a channel development effort?"

Click here for a look at vendors' (not so) basic training offerings.

There are signs that vendors are listening. They're making greater use of the Web and iPods to deliver cheaper, more convenient training to channel partners. Some are offering discounts on training fees, allowing channel partners to use market development funds to pay for training and even letting VAR technicians take certification tests without classroom training.

"We're getting away from the partner-training-as-a-source-of-revenue mentality pretty quickly," says Tom Kelly, vice president of NetApp University, Network Appliance's training organization.

Certification for installing and maintaining IT hardware and software is still at the core of most manufacturers' training regimens for partners, especially as IT products become more complex. But most solution providers work with products from multiple vendors, and meeting all their training and certification requirements can add up to big bucks, not to mention the opportunity costs of having technical staffers sitting in classrooms instead of working in the field.

Heavy Water, for example, resells or works with products from Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Network Physics, Nortel Networks and others--more than a dozen altogether. In an interview late last month, Oh noted that a week earlier he had sent three engineers to Atlanta for training at Riverbed Technology, and three more were about to hit the road for training on Network Physics products. The cost? Upward of $2,000 per engineer per day in lost billings, $500 to $1,000 per employee in travel expenses and hundreds or thousands of dollars in class fees and testing.

Yet Oh will pay if the training provides value for his company. "Certification is a business need," he says. "Our reputation is based on our very strong technical expertise, and it's very important that we maintain that."

NEXT: How vendors are helping to defray those steep training costs.