BMC Helps Partners Climb The Ladder

Plans call for Solution Ladder courses in Java application management, infrastructure and services-level management, and enterprise batch management. First up is the Java application management Solution Ladder, which trains partners on BMC's Patrol management platform for IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic, and then moves them up to Patrol Internet Server, until they finally reach an end-to-end course on Patrol implementation.

"The Solution Ladders program allows partners to go back to their customer base and upsell and cross-sell BMC products. And through the course, partners will be able to offer their customers a broader solution set," said Jon Mertz, manager of the worldwide partner program at Houston-based BMC.

BMC partners stand to earn more revenue by participating in the Solution Ladders programs, according to Mertz. "As they go up the ladder, they get a higher per-dollar transaction rate because the size of the deployments increases. So there is more money," he said.

To participate in the program, partners must sign a letter of commitment, in which they promise to host a certain number of BMC product seminars or introduce a certain number of customers to the BMC product line, among other things, Mertz said. Participating partners also are required to register BMC-related deals with the vendor, Mertz added. BMC is still working out how it would compensate partners who register deals that end up getting closed, said Paige Erickson, worldwide vice president of channels and alliances.

Besides training, the Solution Ladder program also gives partners access to leads generated by BMC, Mertz said.

The Java application management course is set to begin around September. The Patrol Internet Server course is slated to begin three to six months later and the end-to-end Patrol implementation training about six months after that, according to Erickson. The infrastructure and services-level management Solution Ladder and the enterprise batch management Solution Ladder are due to start sometime next year.

The Solution Ladder initiative comes at a time when BMC is offering to relinquish the bulk of its IT services revenue to qualified partners.