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Jim Puchbauer puts it this way: "We have a 10-year pedigree and we're extremely reliable, but what happens when people walk up to us is they say, 'Oh, you sound great, but we've never heard of you guys.'"
It's something Puchbauer has gotten used to hearing. Name recognition has been a problem for Coyote Point Systems, a specialist in application delivery and load balancer technology for SMBs, for nearly its full decade of existence. By focusing on smaller customers instead of the enterprise-heavy deployments of a lot of its competitors, the company built a name for itself among tech insiders. But it's still largely an unknown in the broader context of the channel -- something Puchbauer, who is Coyote Point's director of marketing and business development, intends to fix.
The company in April revamped its channel program with a number of new offerings, including a deal registration program for authorized Coyote Point resellers to protect VARs from larger integrators and direct market resellers like CDW in competitive situations.
It's only the latest in a series of channel moves that the company has been making for the last 18 months. It wants to be a go-to option for solution providers that don't lead with F5 Networks and other application delivery competitors, but who crave 100 percent channel-focused companies that promises tight support and rich margins for a technology that will grow in popularity as more data centers go virtual and get more sophisticated.
"In the midmarket, you want a solid performance factor, a good price and a reliability in ease-of-use. We have all of those things," Puchbauer said. "But we don't have the play. So we're going out this year and really have been going out over the last 18 months to press our awareness. We don't sell anything direct -- we have a channel program that's exciting to the partners, and that protects the partners."
Next: Coyote Point's Growing VARs
