Rethinking Partner Events

Xerox pulled off a rather unusual event recently--a partner conference for VARs who mingled not only with the company's top executives but with Xerox's infamous agents as well. The event was nearly two years in the making. It was the brainchild of Xerox partner chief Gary Gilliam and key members of Xerox's channel marketing team, including Mark Drum, who plans to retire from the vendor after more than two decades of service.

In a nutshell, the Xerox conference--the Partner Summit in Orlando, Fla.--was a success on many fronts. First and foremost, Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO of Xerox, presented the keynote, reassuring partners that the vendor's future depends on a healthy partner community.

After Mulcahy's talk, Xerox presented its product road map; then the company opened a dialog with partners. But this wasn't business as usual. If there was any doubt that Xerox has been keeping its partners satisfied, longtime VAR Ron Cook dispelled it by complimenting Xerox on its partner program and channel initiatives. Cook, who has clearly mellowed out in recent years, was applauded by the VARs in attendance and put a smile on the face of Jerry Farmer, vice president of North American Reseller Sales at Xerox.

One area where the company is doing an excellent job is managed services, according to Tom Catalano, sales manager at Laser Supply, a VAR based in Newtown Square, Pa. While many vendors have been struggling with how to structure a managed-service offering for their partners, Xerox has scored with Partner Pack. Another feather in the vendor's cap is timing. Xerox pulled together a partner meeting at the perfect time and capitalized on the opportunity to keep VARs updated on its plans instead of rehashing and respinning old news.

But VAR feedback wasn't all glowing. Farmer spent a good part of the closing session fielding tough questions from solution providers. Two issues that arose: the vendor's lack of competitive, low-cost MFPs, and competition from Xerox agents, on which the vendor has built its business and is relying in the face of stiff competition from Ricoh and Konica-Minolta.

John Boden, founder and managing partner of VAR QuestingHound, said he's losing business to Konica. A loyal Xerox partner, he faces the inevitable decision of whether to add Konica and other Xerox rivals to his product portfolio or wait for Xerox to plug up the holes in its product line.

The whole experience got me wondering. Do today's major IT vendors need to go through the expense, time and trouble of producing a partner conference every year?

Some of the big players--Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, for example--appear to be preaching to the choir at their events, which generally turn into expensive, feel-good networking parties. Truth be told, if you asked partners whether they got any real value from attending those conferences, they would say it was marginal at best.

Any big-name IT vendor can otherwise reach its partners quite easily. For one, they could hold smaller, strategic gatherings. Or they could leverage the Channel Group's XChange events--the only place for vendors to talk to partners and engage VARs they don't currently do business with.

Maybe the time has come for vendors to be more strategic about organizing partner conferences. That way, they could put the millions of dollars they spend on shows to far better use. And it's not only money that gets wasted; it's the enormous amount of time each company's channel team must spend coordinating the event. It's quite a feat to pull together thousands of employees and partners.

Xerox got it right. Vendors should gather their partners when there's a compelling reason to do so. In most cases, that doesn't require an annual conference.

What do you think of the Xerox event, and about annual partner conferences in general? Let me know.