Exabyte Launches New Partner Program

"[Roughly] 80 percent of our revenue go through VARs. But we don't know who they are. We relied solely on distributors," acknowledges Kerry Brock, vice president of marketing, who recently joined the publicly held firm to oversee its channel marketing.

The ExaPartner Program will offer the vendor's 700 partners, as well as new VARs who sign on, three levels of participation -- registered, authorized and premier, according to a spokesman. Each comes with escalating pricing discounts, margins, sales support and technical support to ensure that VARs receive support appropriate to their level of quarterly sale commitment, he says.

Specifically, registered VARs receive online sales and technical training as well as marketing support. Authorized VARs receive pricing discounts, design registration availability, custom sales support and priority technical support. Premier-level VARs get the highest pricing discounts and access to a special technical support hotline. Authorized- and premier-level VARs automatically get the benefits of previous levels, he says.

Additionally, Exabyte is establishing its own VAR Council, a VAR-led committee created to assist the company in product development and shaping the ExaPartner program.

"[In the past], we had done very little with VARs," Brock says.

Tom Ward, president and CEO of Exabyte, told VARBusiness he's also psyched about a deal announced earlier this month that calls for IBM to buy Exabyte's showcase product, its VXA-2 tape drive, for three of its best-selling server lines: iSeries, pSeries and xSeries.

"That was my No. 1 priority -- getting IBM as a customer," says Ward, who believes that other companies will buy the technology now that IBM has signed up.

Exabyte is positioning its VXA-2 backup technology as an alternative to DDS. VXA-2 provides four times as much capacity, twice as much speed and 180 times the restore integrity of DDS-4, according to the spokesman.