Snap Appliances Rolls Out First Formal Channel Program

Snap Appliance is rolling out its first official channel program since its split from Quantum last November.

The company this week also increased the capacity of its midrange NAS appliance.

When Snap became independent, it inherited about 4,000 solution providers worldwide but had no full-scale channel program of its own, said Jillian Mansolf, vice president of worldwide sales at the vendor. "We want them to opt into a more formal program," she said.

The Snap Connection program offers the company's solution providers a closed-loop sales lead-generation program under which sales leads are qualified and then passed to solution providers for follow-up, Mansolf said. The partner will be asked to rate the lead and follow up within 72 hours, and an additional 48-hour grace period will be granted. If the lead is not acted upon, it will be passed to another solution provider, she said.

Also, the program will offer increased partner training on Snap hardware and complete solutions, Mansolf said. In addition, partners will be eligible for rebates of up to 8 percent and for market-development funds to help defray the cost of activities such as Web advertising and trade-show sponsorship. "This should help neutralize the advantage that large direct marketers have," she said.

Larger solution providers could qualify to have Snap sales and technical employees on-site daily or weekly, and smaller partners will get support from a new inside sales team of 10 people, Mansolf said.

On the product side, Snap this week upped the capacity of its Snap Server 4500 NAS appliance so that solution providers can offer 1 Tbyte of storage. Pricing for the 4500 now starts at $6,495.

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