Staff Aid: How Vendors Help Partners Staff Up

Solution providers aren't the only parties feeling the pain of trying to find, hire and keep the right employees. Vendors with a hefty channel presence -- the IBMs, Microsofts and Ciscos of the industry -- also lose out if their so-called extended sales forces can't keep staffed up. Lost sales will be felt especially hard in the SMB space, a cornerstone of every major vendors' growth strategy today.

Recognizing this, many technology manufacturers are coming to the aid of solution providers like Joel Schleicher, CEO of Presidio, a Cisco partner who is not alone in citing staffing as his "single biggest issue today."

It's a refrain vendors hear all the time.

"I went on a road trip a year ago and asked partners what the biggest impediments to growth, from a macro economic perspective, they saw, and the issue of talent came up everywhere," said Chuck Robbins, vice president of Cisco's U.S. and Canada channels at Cisco.

For Robbins and his boss, Keith Goodwin, this news was a call to action. The company reassigned personnel to work on channel HR issues and reallocated its budget to pay for initiatives aimed at helping partners hire staff -- both technical and sales -- with in-demand skills, such as unified communications and VoIP.

Cisco is approaching the problem from three points: talent attainment and recruitment, talent development and retention. The company runs networking academies to train students on a full curriculum of Cisco products, and is creating a methodology that would enable people from other vertical industries, such as health care or even the military, to learn technology and transition into the IT channel.

Cisco is also building a portal to accommodate many of these initiatives, including sharing internal knowledge and techniques on best practices for compensation planning, performance management and career development.

One of the more innovative proposals that Cisco is working on can be best summed up as job placement. According to Robbins, Cisco itself gets resumes from so more qualified, highly skilled applicants each year than it can hire. Why not steer them in the direction of Cisco partners, he says.

He concedes that Cisco is still trying to figure out the best way to connect applicants with Cisco partners, but if and when the resume-sharing initiative gains traction, it is likely to also become part of the portal being built.

NEXT: What Microsoft is doing to help partners staff up.

Cisco's not the only vendor taking partners' staffing woes seriously. A year ago, Microsoft pledged a $30 million investment to boost partner IT skills and promote retention of these top-notch employees.

Microsoft pushed development of the Partner Skills Plus program in large part because of this year's onslaught of new products out of Redmond, Wash. -- from Windows Vista to Office 2007 and beyond.

"The goal was to increase technical certifications by 40 percent this [fiscal] year," said Don Nelson, general manager of worldwide partner sales and readiness at Microsoft. "If we make it easier for our partners to invest in their people this way, they can build new skills and that's good for retention."

To increase skills certification, Microsoft has done several things: discounts on training (from 25 percent to 30 percent), more types of training from online to classroom, and later this year the introduction of a new level of certification that denotes high skills but is not as exceedingly difficult to attain as the top architect tier, according to Nelson.

Taking advantage of vendor training has been one way that IBM partner Logicalis has gained the goodwill of its employees and, by extension, kept them on board. Nearly 15 percent of the workforce at Logicalis has gained IBM certified solutions architect status.

"This is how we keep people retained and excited," said Jeffrey Teeter, executive vice president and general manager for the Solution Technology Group at Logicalis. "They like being able to work on the higher-level stuff and it keeps them engaged."

Teeter also regaled IBM's Skills for Growth initiative that provides technical cross-training for employees, an ever-growing need in today's solutions-based market.

IBM, Cisco and Microsoft aren't alone in helping their partners with staffing and skills. Hewlett-Packard, Intel and others are also seeing the importance. But it's an endemic problem that will need care and attention for some time.