Intel Adds Incentives, Discounts To Bring Dual-Core To The Fore

At next week’s Intel Solutions Summit, Intel is expected to offer new incentives to its partners, including aggressive discounts on new products.

Steve Dallman, director of North American distribution and channel sales and marketing, said one of Intel’s priorities this year will be to transition the market quickly to dual-core. To spur immediate adoption, it will offer 30- to 60-day discounts on new dual-core processors to the channel.

“I don’t recall Intel ever doing something like this so early in a product transition,” said Dallman.

In addition, Dallman said Intel will work with third-party motherboard makers to offer bundles to branded system makers.

He said Intel also will beef up training, increasing to four times per year from two to three the amount of regional training on building new products. The chip maker also will be working on offering training for Averill that’s the same caliber as what’s available for Viiv, including help with applications that configure virtualization and new security capabilities.

To help partners take advantage of evolving Intel offers, six new business development managers will be hired this year, Dallman added.

Technical support will be improved as well, he said. Intel will expand the number of days and hours tech support is available to partners. For Premier partners, Intel will automatically transfer them to higher-level support technicians if the problem cannot be solved on the first call. Previously, partners had to call a second-level support line directly.

Finally, Intel will increase the number of return units partners can cross-ship. Joe Toste, vice president of Equus Computer Systems, a Minneapolis-based Premier provider, said that offering can be a life saver for urgent service requests and, he noted, “it’s something AMD can’t do.”

Bill Siu, vice president and general manager of Intel’s channel platforms group, said the company has “substantially increased” resources available to the channel. ”We have about 2,000 employees globally working on product creation for the channel,” said Siu, adding that Intel’s goal is “to make the channel grow faster than the average” Intel business unit.