CA Asks Partners To 'Believe Again'

Delivered with the admission that it has often let partners down, CA executives made a pledge Monday to grow the company's revamped midmarket and enterprise business by making dramatic changes to the way it pays channel partners, involves them in sales, and trains and communicates with them.

"What we are really doing is asking you to believe again," Donald Friedman, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, told a large audience of solution providers during a symposium at CA World 2005, the vendor's partner conference taking place this week in Las Vegas. The "trust issues" between CA and solution providers are going to be resolved, he said.

As a start, CA will adopt a policy that delivers rebates and MDFs to partners with qualified leads before the sales close, enriching partners sooner and empowering them to close deals faster, said James Hanley, senior vice president of worldwide partner sales. CA also will work to shorten sales cycles for partners and make sales opportunities more inclusive for smaller partners by reducing layers of bureaucracy and paperwork.

CA will increase its field engagement with partners not just at the top-tier Alliance Partner level--those elite solution providers that assist CA's direct sales team in catering to the vendor's named accounts--but at the midtier Enterprise and Premier Partner levels as well, said Hanely. Incentives that include commission bonuses as high as 130 percent will be given to direct sales people who bring a partner in on a deal, he said. Refreshed training programs on CA's new Service Availability solution product strategy will appear, as will an around-the-clock telephone support line partners can use to clarify sales, marketing and technical issues, said Hanely.

Solution providers attending the conference were thrilled, and a bit shocked, by the commitment CA has pledged.

Jose Albino, principal at Attain Technologies, an $8-million-a-year solution provider and CA partner in Englewood, Calif., said CA's vow to shorten sales cycles is long overdue.

Albino, who said the changes in CA's product line announced this week could drive his revenue to $20 million a year, has been waiting for CA to get the lead out of closing deals with partners. He almost lost a large deal that included CA's eTrust security product because confusion from CA about negotiating the partner side of the contract dragged the deal out for more than three months.

"The deal went back and forth forever, mostly about how to create the contract and how the reps on both sides [channel and vendor] were being compensated," recalled Albino.

Hanley said this type of behavior from CA would be curtailed. "We're going to speed up sales cycles," he said. "We have been going through lengthy exception processes, what we call B.A.R.F.s, or business analysis review forms. They take time, and we need to learn to limit this."

Unlike the changes to CA's distribution channels that took place in January as the vendor revamped both its partner program and product strategy, no changes will take place to CA's current arrangement with distributors as the vendor rolls out the Service Availability solution, said Hanely. The Service Availability solution makes for a fine MSP model, but CA has pledged not to compete with partners, many of which are adding managed services, by becoming an MSP itself, he said.

Steve Moisoff, vice president of sales at Computer Network Solutions (CNS), a CA partner who expects to make nearly $100 million in revenue next year driven primarily from its MSP business, said he's seen a "huge turnaround" in the way CA treats its partners. CA has been flexible in the way it does business with CNS, and "CA has even worked with us on a cost model that takes into account the long-term billing of our MSP model," he said.

Anthony Ferrigno, CTO and vice president of business development at Ciber, a solution provider, MSP and CA partner in Edison, N.J., said CA has always had the ability to be a good channel partner. "Very few vendors could have pulled off such a change to their core fabric," said Ferrigno.