Verio Vows To 'Richly Reward' Partners

The program, due out in June, promises to "richly reward" partners for driving new business, said Craig Schlagbaum, Verio's new vice president of enterprise-hosting channel sales.

Schlagbaum, largely credited with developing Qwest Communications International's new Business Partner Program before leaving the company earlier this year, would not outline commission structure details.

"We are making adjustments to make the commission structure more favorable and more rewarding for those that drive new business," he said.

Schlagbaum described the program as a "hard-core channel strategy" that will be adopted by all of Verio's divisions and will position the Englewood-based hosting and data services company as solution providers' vendor of choice. The program is expected to target resellers that would receive a discount on Verio services and agents that would receive a commission for selling services.

These partners will sell an expanded set of dedicated Web-hosting offerings introduced by Verio last week. The new offerings include enhanced monitoring services, SANs, hot database backup and enhanced firewall services.

"We are taking a more modularized approach to make it easier for partners to mix and match their offerings with ours," said Schlagbaum.

Dedicated channel managers are being assigned to work with Verio's direct-sales force to close channel and direct deals together, he said.

Solution providers said many of the enhancements center on electronically enabled support for ordering, managing and installing Verio services.

"Electronically enabling us to gain access to their back-office systems is critical when dealing with a carrier organization," said Greg Zulli, president, CEO and co-founder of CarrierChoice, Bethlehem, Pa. "This will allow us to be more profitable because we can turn around orders and implementations more efficiently," he said.

Diane Bennett, director of business services at solution provider Zones, Renton, Wash., said Verio has a renewed focus on communication with partners.

"We've been working with them for two years and have worked with three different divisions, and this is the only time we've really been engaged in the offering and the deployment," Bennett said. "They're now seeking our input and we are dealing with at least two levels of the organization."