Tracking services- and maintenance-renewal contracts on customers' technology assets is one of the bigger headaches for solution providers, especially those dealing with a high volume of clients using a plethora of vendor technologies.
Ingram Micro and MaintenanceNet, a leading provider of maintenance contract-management services, hope to ease the pain with a new tool that aims to automate and simplify the tracking process so that VARs can more efficiently renew contracts and also drive new sales of services and technology refreshes. Launched today and dubbed the Reseller Services Portal, the service aggregates asset information from Hewlett-Packard-, IBM- and Cisco-based services and maintenance contracts sold through Ingram and its VAR partners.
The idea, says MaintenanceNet CEO Scott Herron, is to provide an integrated, one-point-of-contact system that alerts all constituents -- vendor, distributor, solution provider and customer -- to an upcoming services-renewal expiration date.
“Used to be that distributors tracked assets like maintenance-renewal contracts via Excel spreadsheets that got sent around,” explains Herron, whose company will manage the new portal service and the necessary feeds into each company to enable data aggregation. “But how can you take a specific product serial number and match it to a specific VAR? This portal will let you.”
MaintenanceNet, which has embarked on a similar service for Avnet and is in talks with three other IT distributors, will use a system of data feeds from customers, solution providers and Ingram to populate the portal. Among other capabilities, solution providers will be able to organize their customers' contracts by 30-, 60- and 90-day expiration status, filter contracts by vendor, distributor or end user, search by different means, such as purchase order numbers or serial numbers, and generate customer reports based on predetermined criteria.
Herron says the key benefit for solution providers is not just getting renewal information into the hands of salespeople more efficiently, but also allowing them to see a customer’s entire asset portfolio. This will highlight opportunities to go beyond a contract renewal to pitch a new technology sale or refresh, he said.
