LANDesk Unveils New Deal Registration Program

The 20:20 Opportunity Registration program provides an automatic 20 percent discount to all solution providers selling LANDesk products and an additional discount of up to 20 percent for LANDesk channel partners with the vendor's Expert Solution Provider (ESP) or Global Solution Provider (GSP) designation.

The discounts are available on deals greater than $20,000 that have a 50 percent or higher probability of closing during the quarter they are registered; which means that face-to-face meetings have been held, product demos have been completed and an agreement has been reached with the customer to go forward on a purchase.

"This is a refinement of our channel program, to make sure our good partners are protected," said Nolan Rosen, vice president of worldwide marketing at the South Jordan, Utah-based desktop, server and device management suite vendor, in a break between sessions at the Miami event.

Longtime LANDesk reseller NetworkD lauded the vendor's move, citing the long sales cycles for these products. "There's a huge cost to presales [in this market], that's why the 20:20 program is so critical," said Ashley Leonard, CEO of the Newport Beach, Calif., firm. "For a company like ours, that spends a lot of money getting new business, it's great."

LANDesk CEO Joe Wang said the program is part of the "long-term view" his management team takes toward its channel relationships. "Peace of mind for our channel partners is critical," Wang said in an interview with CRN on Monday after his keynote address kicking off the event at the Doral Golf Resort. "We're 100 percent channel driven," he said. "We don't compete with our partners."

LANDesk, which was spun out from Intel in 2002, has so far competed mostly in the midmarket against vendors such as Microsoft, Novell and Altiris. Yet executives used this year's conference to galvanize channel partners for an assault on the enterprise, where LANDesk products will go head-to-head with the large, complex network and systems management offerings of the big framework vendors such as IBM Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard and Computer Associates International.

"We're taking our midmarket strength and we're moving up," said Mike Hall, LANDesk vice president of worldwide sales. "There's great momentum in the enterprise; people aren't happy with the frameworks."

Wang said he was confident that enterprise CIOs, who have struggled with the long and expensive deployments of large network and systems management products, would welcome LANDesk's offerings. "CIOs are more sensitive to ROI," he said. "It takes a week to two weeks to deploy our product--that's the main reason for enterprise companies to start to look at suite vendors like us."

A privately held company, LANDesk does not publish quarterly financial figures, but executives at the conference told the approximately 800 attendees that the company had posted 15 profitable quarters and that sales in 2003 grew 50 percent over 2002. Two-thirds of 2003 product revenues were from new license sales, and more than half of revenue came from outside the United States, executives said.

The company has more than 350 employees and offices in eight countries, they said.