MOCA Helps VARs 'Make The Sale'

Under the distributor's Make The Sale program, qualified end-user leads are identified by MOCA from its database of 30,000-plus potential clients and passed to the appropriate solution provider based on the customer's location, said Laura Schurr, director of marketing services at MOCA, El Segundo, Calif.

Leads are expected to come from both Solaris and non-Solaris customers with annual revenue of $75 million to $2 billion, company executives said.

Solution providers that attended Arrow's 2003 Net@Work Partner Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., Oct. 19-22, said they're excited about the new program.

"It's always difficult to decide where to maximize your resources," said Richard Taylor, president and CEO of Argenta Technologies Group, a Longwood, Fla.-based solution provider formed a few months ago from the combined commercial and education units of a Sun channel partner.

"You need to look at how to maintain and grow your sales base. A salesperson might cost $100,000 a year, and it's hard to invest that kind of resource in cold-calling," Taylor said. "Make The Sale provides us with an entree into qualified leads. ... It shows that MOCA is sincere in its investment in us."

MOCA's program lets solution providers offload marketing efforts so they can work on other opportunities, said Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider that recently signed on with Sun.

"I'm a data storage integrator without a separate marketing department," Edwards said. "I need to leverage these opportunities. Since MOCA does this on behalf of many partners, it's cost-effective for them. And the more opportunities I get, the more I can close on, and the more opportunities for Sun and its channel."

MOCA has signed up 16 partners for the program, including Argenta and Alliance, and expects a minimum of 25 altogether, Schurr said. It's open to Sun's Storage Elite partners and to other partners that haven't yet qualified for Elite status, she said.

The program's budget,$50,000 to $100,000,is funded by Arrow, Schurr said. It will continue to run in its present form until early December, at which time it will be re-evaluated for its ROI prior to a January 2004 relaunch, she said.