Vendor Initiatives Provide Partners With An Edge In Tough Economy

IBM has long offered its ISV partners a range of marketing assistance and other services and the vendor is on a crusade to get word out to its partners about what the company offers. "We are reaching out to our partner community right now and our message is how we can help them in these challenging times," said Chris Wong, IBM vice president of ISV and developer relations.

IBM, for example, offers partners a "virtual marketing department" that provides free assistance for planning marketing campaigns. The company even pays some of the costs of managing and executing marketing campaigns (such as mailings): up to 35 percent for Advanced members of the IBM PartnerWorld program and up to 65 percent for Premier members.

IBM is even offering free half-day classes at its 41 "innovation centers" to help educate business partners about what the company has to offer, Wong said. "We have all this stuff and our partners don't know how to use it. They've got to leverage us. This is the time."

Under its Partner Enablement 2.0 initiative unveiled at Oracle OpenWorld in September, Oracle is expanding the number of free "boot camp" training sessions it provides to implementation partners on such technology topics as application integration infrastructure, as well as on specific Oracle products.

And some vendors are cutting their channel partners some slack on bureaucratic requirements, letting solution providers focus on more important tasks -- like selling. In early November Ciscos Systems said it was letting some of its channel partners skip their annual certification audits in a move designed to help partners cut costs. Cisco said it would waive the audit requirement for one year for "partners in good standing" that have the correct number of certified personnel and are current with their specializations and training.

Cisco also said it would pay partners to perform network assessments for customers and would cut demo equipment purchase requirements.