Two Giants Survive the Telco Meltdown

Against a backdrop of continuing chaos, the telecoms continue turning to IP and data services for financial relief. But with many of the firms either in management and/or financial disarray, partners did not judge the category in VARBusiness' 2003 Annual Report Card favorably.

Perhaps attention focused on other areas is diverting resources away from these vendors' partner programs. Out of 15 criteria, AT&T and Qwest--the contenders in the business class IP and data services category--fell short of the ARC average 12 times. They only bested the rest for product quality/reliability and partner portals, and tied the average in managing channel conflict. The two companies fell way short in marketing support and ease of doing business.

Regardless, AT&T won the individual category. "We have enjoyed a strong partnership with AT&T for several years," says Mark Munger, CEO of San Diego-based Valcros Communications. "AT&T's support of our business through education and field support has enabled [our company] to provide a top-quality product as part of the best solution for our customers."

Munger was also pleased with AT&T's online resources. "[It] did a great job of providing the online tools necessary to develop the solutions and deliver the proposals in the time frame our customers demand," he says.

This year, AT&T issued channel-practice guidelines that serve as "a playbook and a set of expectations that help both partners and the direct-sales team figure out how, when and where to best collaborate," according to Keith Olsen, AT&T's vice president of indirect channels. "[In addition], we structured incentives to target the markets and solutions where we needed our partners' focus, and they could increase their ROI."

And while AT&T beat out Qwest as the category winner, the second-place finisher, nonetheless, won top honors for partnership, passing AT&T in five of the subcategory's seven criterion. The only other place Qwest nudged ahead was in postsales support.

"Mobile IP and data services are still in their nascent stage of development," says Dan Bommer, president of Telesis Management. "The standardization of payment-for-use has not been formulated as vendors are quickly trying to plug holes in the coverage and race each other for market share. Once saturation begins to be realized, pricing and delivery will be determined by the dominant player or players."