SMARTS Expands Channel Program

"As a company we're making a concerted effort to bring a partner into every deal where we can," said Roger Pilc, COO of the White Plains-based vendor.

As evidence, Pilc points to SMARTS' growing channel sales, which now account for 50 percent of the company's total revenue, up from about 20 percent last year.

The company expects to grow its channel business to more than 65 percent of its total revenue by the end of the year, he said.

The SMARTS InCharge management suite provides root cause analysis capabilities, gathering data from network devices, servers, applications and databases to diagnose problems and delineate their impact on service delivery.

InCharge's stand-out features include automatic topology discovery and mapping, said Brian Hepburn, executive vice president at Empowered Networks, a network integrator based in Toronto.

"Being able to sift through the thousands of events that happen on any network and being able to distill down to figure out the unique problems and act on them, that's what our customers are looking to do," Hepburn said.

The solution provider is incorporating the InCharge technology into its network, application and performance assessment services, Hepburn said.

The new SMARTS Alliances partner program includes five categories: consulting, reseller and federal partner designations for solution providers, a technology partner designation for third-party product vendors and a strategic alliance designation for OEM partners.

The program has about 60 partners, including 10 technology and strategic alliance partners, Pilc said.

SMARTS plans to add 20 or 30 new partners within the next 12 months, he said.

The vendor has also improved its technical, sales and marketing support programs by dedicating more employees to channel support roles, Pilc said.

"Last quarter, half of the hiring we did was people for recruiting or supporting our channel in one way or another," Pilc said.

SMARTS has formed a team of sales engineers earmarked to work with partners so they can have a consistent contact within the company, Pilc said, declining to divulge the number of engineers on the team.