Sonic Flies Partner Flag

The SonicSynergy Business Partner Program has three tiers of membership,member, select and premier, said Peter Foster, Sonic's senior director of systems integrator partners.

A solution provider pays a $5,000 fee to attain member status. In turn, the partner receives training and certification for five people in two different tracks, enterprise messaging and standards-based messaging and Web services, Foster said.

Those tracks are congruent with the Sonic MQ messaging framework, based on Java Messaging Service (JMS), and the XML-based Sonic XQ enterprise service bus.

Sonic also offers members the option of participating in an accelerated "boot camp" that "crams both [tracks into a one-week training program," Foster said.

Sonic is one of a new breed of vendors, including SpiritSoft and Orion Systems, offering low-cost integration software based on standards. Solution providers said this emerging technology provides stiff competition to proprietary-based EAI software from large vendors.

"When you look at traditional players like Tibco and webMethods, they all have proprietary software," said Pragnesh Dave, an enterprise architect for Genisys Consulting, Elk Grove Village, Ill. "The big advantage with Sonic is the whole nature of open standards. It changes the whole paradigm. Skill sets are easily available for these kinds of applications, and it's easy to get resources."

Once partners have at least five engineers trained on the products and at least three certified, and have completed one Sonic-based solution, they reach the select tier of membership, Foster said.

The highest program level, premier, requires that a partner have 15 engineers trained, seven people certified and three projects completed using Sonic products, he said.

After the initial training, it costs $1,000 to train an engineer, Foster added.

Though all partners receive marketing resources and sales leads, Foster said Sonic allocates greater resources and market development funds to premier partners. Sonic also is more likely to pass on a lead for a large-scale project to a premier partner than to a solution provider at a lower level, he said.

While all Sonic sales are direct, about 40 percent of customer engagements involve a solution provider. Ultimately, Sonic would like to use a partner on about 75 percent of customer implementations, Foster said.