3 Questions: Tiffani Bova

Bova: [We just launched] an associate member program ... for the smaller-size VARs who will have access to an online quoting and ordering system to order products from us. They won’t necessarily have an outside rep or an inside rep assigned to them. [The target VAR is] someone who is quite small and wants to get just one desktop or one notebook.

CRN: Before the associate level, how did you handle those smaller orders?

Bova: I don’t want to say we didn’t. But we didn’t do it very efficiently, let’s put it that way. Sales reps are sales reps. They’re going to spend time on what gives them the biggest bang for the buck. So we missed out on opportunities.

CRN: With the convergence of the digital and analog worlds, where does the channel fit?

Bova: We’ve had a tremendous amount of uptick in our plasma [display] offering. And it’s actually pulling behind it servers and desktops. … As businesses start to get more visual in their marketing activities--hotels, banks, restaurants, everybody’s got plasmas--they need to be operated and run from something. It’s usually a server or a desktop. Hence, we’ve been pulling our core business from the plasma side. Is our A/V portfolio going to be as robust as it has been? Ah, no. How it fits within the channel is that as solution providers start to broaden their portfolios to include some of these A/V products, we’re able to offer them [products] that are core.

 Published for the Week Of October 11, 2004