Lion Of Loyalty

For the past nine years, Tim Spires has been a diehard Novell fan. His company, EST Group, boasts the largest Novell identity-management practice in the Southwest and generates about 60 percent of its overall IT business from Novell-related implementations and services. That's no coincidence. Spires vets and re-evaluates his vendor partners methodically. He can't speak highly enough about Novell, its channel perks and its executive leadership, and he characterizes the partnership as one built on consistent quid pro quo. So when Microsoft came knocking earlier this year, he needed a pretty good reason to consider dividing his loyalties.

"I told them I wasn't interested in becoming one of 300 Microsoft partners in the Dallas area," Spires says. "I was interested in being one of maybe two partners in Texas that fulfill a specific need for them."

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Microsoft stepped up, winning Spires' allegiance by placing EST Group in a "fast-track" program aimed at cultivating partners qualified to provide specific technology solutions in regions where demand outstrips supply. In this case, EST Group is focusing on application-integration services around BizTalk Server, SharePoint Portal Server and single-sign-on technology.

Spires' loyalty to Novell hasn't dimmed, he says. And while Microsoft still has a way to go to match some of the benefits Novell provides its channel partners, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant's willingness to meet his demands won his commitment.

"I would have declined to partner with them had it not been for that," he says.

Earning Allegiance
Stroll the halls of any solution-provider IT conference and you're sure to hear at least a few contentious gab sessions about partner loyalty: Is it a good thing? Are you better off aligning your company with just a few technology firms or shuffling the deck on a regular basis? Do market leaders, such as Microsoft, have the right to expect exclusivity from their channel partners? And so on.

In general, most solution providers don't like getting their arms twisted. Rather than having vendors demand their loyalty, they agree it should be earned through more personalized attention, superior sales and technical support, higher margins, favorable pricing, fruitful leads and marketing assistance. They want the whole carrot, not just the stick.

NEXT: Which vendors have figured that out better than others.