Partner Programs Guide Roundtable: Worldwide Leaders

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The global IT market will be nearly $3 trillion by 2008. Most of the growth is coming from developing countries, such as China, India, Russia and Brazil. Multinational vendors carved out their share of foreign markets long ago, developing partner relationships with local distributors, integrators and solution providers. Now, they're looking to bring their U.S. partners closer to their overseas associates to form new alliances, undertake new initiatives and reap the rewards of fertile opportunities.

Sitting atop the mountain of multinational vendors are the standard-bearers of U.S. technology: IBM, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Symantec. Collectively, they drive billions of dollars of product, marketing and development through the global channel. And their plans include more opportunity for partners of all sizes--here and abroad.

In a meeting of titans not seen since President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met at Yalta in 1945, VARBusiness recently hosted a summit of these global leaders in Las Vegas. Our editors quizzed IBM's Donn Atkins, Cisco's Keith Goodwin, HP's John Thompson, Microsoft's Allison Watson and Symantec's Julie Parrish. The insights and strategies revealed in this confab provide solution providers with a road map to the future globalized channel.

VARBUSINESS: There are huge opportunities for VARs and ISVs on all levels to either enter foreign markets or partner with foreign companies. How are you encouraging or facilitating the globalization of the channel?

ATKINS: To me, globalization is a phenomenon that really has reached its time and will help our partners grow. It will help all of us leverage this collective capability that, if it works in one place and there's a desire, it can work in other places. In some cases, you'll see a horizontal solution focus. One of the things that we have discovered is that in the spirit of reducing complexity or providing greater simplicity, we had an approach that's been in the marketplace for a number of years that ended up being a pretty good framework for international partnering--PartnerWorld Industry Network. Initially, it was an ISV recruitment and enablement program, and it works so well that we just decided to use that as the framework for all ecosystem development. It provides a way to document a partner's capabilities, to understand where capacity exists and determine where you'd like to have capacity.

VB: The multinational vendors have agreements with global and regional distributors. What is their role in developing these ecosystems?

ATKINS: They're facilitating relationships between partners. They're not doing it for us, but we're working together to help them. One of our largest distributors in France has a tremendous program. He operates in about seven or eight countries across Europe, and he knows all of his partners' capabilities and operating requirements. He really adds value to his partners because he's able to match a firm, for instance, that needs a security specialist when they're working on their niche--say, banking platforms.

THOMPSON: The demands of being global have increased for vendors and solution providers. We have people on the ground for the large distributors or the large OEMs that we work with, and that's part of the relationship we provide. But they also want to be able to scale and, ironically, that requires more simplicity. So that's where the IT investments come in. The simpler you can make your partner program, the more you can scale it around the world.

We've created a global umbrella infrastructure with PartnerOne. We have a global portal and a global-certification process where if you're certified in one country you're automatically certified in another country. However, the other challenge with being multinational is that there is no EMEA [Europe, Middle East, Africa] region. It's Germany and France, and let's face it, the Germans don't want to do things the same way as the French. What's going on in Belgium is different than what's going on in New York. You must customize for local conditions and cultural aspects, as well as the technology and the business aspects. Some people don't want to be associated with the rest of the world or the rest of a region. There's a very nationalistic tendency for some countries.

VB: Customizing is a tricky issue, as is defining the partners you're trying to bring overseas. How do you define a partner, and how does that factor into the globalization strategy?

GOODWIN: At Cisco, we're focusing less on trying to develop programs for a specific partner type because the partner type is no longer valid. We've had a lot of discussions about the fact that we need a "service provider" partner program. Now, what does that really mean? What they're really saying is, we need a managed-services offering because service providers primarily go to market around managed services. However, many of our systems integrators and VARs are looking at managed-service offerings. And many of those service providers who early on have gone with managed services are now going with a systems-integration offering as well. The lines are blurring. What we're trying to do is embrace that and allow partners to differentiate in the ways that make sense for their market focus and customers. We think those things apply on a global basis, so as we introduce our new program, the intent is to do that globally, and the challenge is always to get that balance between global and local.

NEXT: How vendors are striking that balance.