Voyence Channel Chief Vows To Boost Margins

Mitch Miller, Voyence&s first-ever director of channels, aims to swell partner margins, increase indirect sales, spur software development around the vendor&s platform and drive most of Voyence&s professional services through the channel.

“Right now the channel makes up about 25 percent of our revenue. By the end of this quarter I&ll get us close to 45 percent. And we would like to see it go above 60 percent over the next nine months,” said Miller, who took on the new role Aug. 22.

Margins for Voyence partners are also on an upward flight path under Miller&s direction. Margins are currently in the 30 percent range and could go up to 40 percent, he said.

But Miller plans to make partners work for the additional business and extended margins by transitioning Voyence&s professional services responsibilities onto the shoulders of channel resellers and directing the richest opportunities to those partners that can develop technology around products such as VoyenceControl 3.3, a network configuration management offering announced in May, Miller said.

Miller said he wants to see “99 percent” of Voyence&s professional services action run through the channel. To seed this goal, the Richardson, Texas-based company is in the process of releasing its APIs to partners to enable them to develop on the vendor&s platform, he said.

The result should be a partner program that “supports different types of partner integration specialties,” said Miller. “Strong integration partners” that can make headway in fashioning Voyence technology for both horizontal and vertical markets will be rewarded on a sliding margin scale that won&t contain top performers in preassigned groups. “We will be rolling out a flex margin program, like a flex spending program. And the better a partner is, the more dollars he&ll make,” Miller said.

Miller&s new strategy should enable solution providers to build up stronger services practices, said Henry Draughon, business development manager at Florance and Associates Consulting, a Voyence partner also based in Richardson.

“The program gives us services revenue from developing on the APIs, something we don&t have now,” said Draughon. “Right now services make up about 15 percent of our revenue, and the target is 40 percent by 2006.”

As a seasoned channel partner of Packeteer, an application traffic management vendor in Cupertino, Calif., Draughon sees the Voyence product line as complementary to Packeteer&s technology and expects to leverage and upsell his existing customer base.

As a Voyence reseller, Draughon is also in a fairly intimate club.

Voyence currently has about 35 or so partners in its reseller ranks, said Miller, who intends to keep that number pretty much fixed. Instead of promising room for everyone in the Voyence program, Miller said he's looking to improve the quality of the current partner base. "You'll see some attrition, some addition," he said.

With more than 15 years of channel management experience under his belt, Miller comes prepared. Before joining Voyence he was the director of channels at InfoVista, and before that held the same title at Micromuse.