Arrow Aims To Sharpen Business Insight In The Channel

Three classes will be held May 9-12 at the Indianapolis event. They will cover strategies for small and entrepreneurial businesses, effective marketing strategy, and merger evaluation and deal structuring. The classes complement an existing class that Arrow developed to help business owners better evaluate which types of personnel are a good fit for their organizations.

According to Arrow Executive Vice President Eric Williams, the move toward adding executive training to the May Days technical and sales training sessions is a direct response to IBM's call for a more solutions-based approach in the channel.

"IBM is moving more toward a solutions-based selling [approach] rather than a horizontal infrastructure approach. When you start looking at altering your routes to market, and what may have been successful in the past in terms of mining your installed base, that's not good enough today," Williams said. "You have to look at how you interact with ISVs and go after the competitive space. The business leaders of these forms need to think more strategically than tactically than they have in the past to achieve the growth numbers IBM is looking for in the channel."

Todd Cannady, vice president of marketing and business development at Yorel Integrated Solutions, a Raleigh, N.C.-based solution provider, said the new executive-focused education represents the next level of training services that distributors need to provide to continue adding value. Technical training has become standardized, and existing sales training is focused on products, he said.

"These types of classes really focus on sales management, so it takes it to another level," Cannady said.

Arrow chose to partner with Indiana University because it has a graduate program that focuses on executive education, and it worked with Arrow to customize the courseware for channel executives, according to Mike Nowlan, director of product marketing for the distributor's SupportNet arm.

The Arrow event also is slated to provide on-site testing for technical and sales certifications for IBM, which need to be renewed by July, Williams said.

Besides recruiting Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard VARs, Arrow has signed up a few dozen solution providers that had formerly purchased primarily through broadline distributors. Driving that trend is the increased complexity that VARs are encountering as they craft solutions atop IBM xSeries systems.

"As Intel and IBM move up the food chain, a lot of the skills needed--along with the support required--lend themselves more to us than to a typical volume distributor," Williams said. "As resellers start looking at their ROI as they move up that food chain, we should be able to provide results that are superior to the way they used to do business. So we should continue to gain momentum."