Stars Among The VARs

So what has your vendor done for you lately? Sure, the technology itself is important: Any product that's not innovative or doesn't provide value to customers is a non-starter. And margins offered by vendors are also important: VARs that can't earn a decent profit on a product won't be in business for very long.

But a successful vendor partnership must go beyond--way beyond--good margins and solid products. It starts with how a vendor recruits channel partners and includes pre- and post-sales support, marketing efforts, training and partner communications, among other initiatives.

"The most important thing a vendor can do is dance with us," said Rolf Strasheim, director of client solutions at Peak Uptime, a Tulsa, Okla.-based solution provider that partners with storage equipment vendors such as Network Appliance Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., and Overland Storage, San Diego. Any potential vendor partner has to, first, have a top quality product that allows Peak Uptime to make a decent profit, he said, but above, all it's important that they make a commitment to their channel partners.

So it is with great pride that we offer this year's VARBusiness Partner Programs Guide and the Five-Star Partner Programs awards that recognize those vendors with the most comprehensive channel offerings for their particular markets and technology sets. Silver and gold-star winners have listened to their partners and assembled programs that offer key elements for channel success.

(Vendors that excelled in specific partner program criteria such as sales support, marketing support, partner profitability, channel operations, communications and partner recruitment earned silver stars for each element, while those with overall top-notch partner programs won gold stars. For a detailed description of the judging methodology see page 40.)

It's hard to find a vendor that isn't good at something when it comes to partnering with solution providers. Of the 125 vendors that applied for this year's guide, most won at least one silver star for some aspect of their partner program, such as Ricoh Americas Corp. (West Caldwell, N.J.) for partner profitability, Autodesk Inc. (San Rafael, Calif.) for sales support, Ipswitch Inc. (Lexington, Mass.) for partner recruitment and Level 3 Communications Inc. (Broomfield, Colo.) for, appropriately enough, communication with channel partners.

But the vendors that solution providers should think about hitching their wagons to, if they haven't already, are the 64 companies whose partner programs won an overall gold designation in this year's VARBusiness Partner Programs Guide. And the cream of that crop are the dozen vendors who won overall gold and silver stars in all six partner program criteria and the 17 vendors who won overall gold and silver stars in five of the six criteria.

Outside of those high-achievers, 21 vendors won a single silver star while another 20 garnered two, 19 won three silver stars and 21 were awarded four.

One finding of this year's VARBusiness Partner Programs Guide is just how good many smaller vendors have become at assembling top-notch partner programs. Sure, the list of gold-star vendors includes such big names as Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, Calif.) and IBM Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.) But this year's gold-star roster is heavily populated with small companies such as Epicor Software Corp. (Irvine, Calif.), FalconStor Software Inc. (Melville, N.Y.), QLogic Corp. (Aliso Viejo, Calif.) and Sophos Plc. (Burlington, Mass.), proving that world-class partner programs aren't found only among multibillion-dollar companies.

Take Acronis Inc., a Burlington, Mass.-based developer of data backup and disaster recovery software that competes against such giants as Symantec Corp. (Cupertino, Calif.) and CA Inc. (Islandia, N.Y.) Acronis won silver-star designations for channel operations, sales support, marketing support and partner recruitment, as well as a gold-star designation for its overall channel program. In 2007 the vendor added 500 new partners and expects to increase that roster by another 50 percent in 2008, according to the company's VARBusiness Partner Programs Guide application.

Acronis has been aggressively recruiting solution provider partners by offering free certification training and a deal registration program that offers rebates or up-front discounts even if a reseller doesn't win a contract. Certainly Acronis' products are a key attraction for solution providers. But it goes beyond technology. Channel partners want to be sure their investment in a vendor in time and resources will be protected, said Eric Dougherty, channel sales director at Acronis. "It comes down to trust. Can they trust their vendor? There's a lot of solution providers out there that have been burned."

"They're extremely channel-friendly," says Mike Piltoff, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Champion Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider that partners with Acronis. He praised them particularly for the two-way, lead-generation efforts the vendor and partner engage in. "We bring them in and they bring us in," Piltoff said.

Juniper Networks Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., isn't exactly a small company, although it often plays the role of David to Cisco's Goliath in the networking arena. Phil O'Reilly, CEO of Solunet Inc., a Melbourne, Fla.-based solution provider, said Juniper has been an effective partner because the vendor understands that ultimately it's the solution provider/customer relationship that's most important, even more so than the solution provider/vendor relationship. Juniper even helps its channel partner promote their own brands, he said, rather than just trying to drive the Juniper message through the channel to end-user customers.

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