Agere Overcoming an Identity Crisis

"What we suffer from more than anything in the marketplace is an identity crisis," says Jeff Manning, business manager of the Americas for Agere Systems, the former microelectronics division of Lucent Technologies and the company behind OriNoco.

While the entity has been building wireless networking products for more than a decade, in establishing itself as an independent company last year Agere found itself without strong ties to solution providers. That's because as part of Lucent, it had the larger company's direct sales force as its main go-to-market channel. While the spin-off of Avaya Communications from Lucent in late 2000 gave the company some access to resellers, most of those resellers knew the Agere products only as Avaya-branded solutions.

"Then we got spun off and, all of a sudden, we had no channel to market," Manning says.

The company's first move was to establish close ties with distributors like Ingram Micro and Tech Data, leveraging their VAR partners to build a network of resellers through road shows and other educational programs. Then it set up a partner program with three levels: Registered, for entry-level VARs; Authorized, for partners willing to go through product training; and Elite, for select companies with the skills to handle the largest accounts.

"We have about a dozen elite VARs right now, and that's pretty much the number we want to keep it at," Manning says. "These guys have services and skills above and beyond the other ones. These are the guys we will funnel incoming leads [to for large-scale projects, because we know these guys can take it cradle to grave."

It looks like the past year's work is starting to pay off. Today, Agere has roughly 1,000 reseller partners. And unlike some companies that deliberately cap the number of partners, Manning says he wants to see that number grow even higher. "You can never have enough feet on the street," he says. "We can't manage that many of them ourselves, but our channel partners can."