Avnet Offers HP OpenView Mentor Program

The Partner Assist program is designed to help partners increase their OpenView technical and sales proficiency through personalized training, presales and implementation assistance, customized lead generation and prequalified selling opportunities, according to Tim Fitzgerald, director of marketing for the HP business unit at Avnet Partner Solutions Americas, Tempe, Ariz.

The program aims to continue Avnet's "explosive growth" in OpenView the last year, Fitzgerald said. In particular, the initiative is intended to help solution providers sort through the acquisitions HP has made in the last year or two around the OpenView suite, he said.

"There's a lot of complexity with those solutions, whether it's change and configuration management, identity management, asset management," he said. "Talking to partners, there's a lot of heavy lifting to build out a practice in those complex areas. Avnet and HP are coming together to enhance the sales, marketing and technical competency around those solutions sets. The goal is to get more partners in the program."

Avnet will evolve Partner Assist as new technologies are added to the HP OpenView management software portfolio. For example, the distributor is helping partners pursue OpenView opportunities in Web applications and identity management.

"As the [Partner Assist] name implies, the program is predicated on mentoring partners," Fitzgerald said. "We have technical people to work shoulder to shoulder with people inside key VARs. They will call directly on end customers to identify and qualify these solutions to real business problems."

Avnet believes solution providers that make the investment will be well rewarded, Fitzgerald added.

"I haven't done the math on the investment it takes because you'd have to do it solution area by solution area. Because of the complexity of OpenView solutions, it takes a lot of knowledge to be really good, which is probably why OpenView resellers are not as pervasive as industry-standard resellers," he said. "Having a lot of people focused around OpenView becomes an expensive proposition. The size is something that it's a consideration. The barriers to entry are high, but the return on investment is high."

For the last year, HP executives have wanted solution providers to sell more of the company's broader solutions, such as software, services and storage, and they have built the requisite programs to do that. Partner Assist isn't a direct extension of that strategy, but it does complement it, Fitzgerald said.

"There's a lot of [energy around] partners focusing on the full HP portfolio. In addition to this program, there are a lot of programs from Avnet and HP that make it worthwhile to sell more HP products," he said. "This is not a cause and effect, but there is a lot of alignment between this and other HP portfolio programs. Our new fiscal year begins in July, and our OpenView expectations are aggressive. We're going to add more partners to the program, but we want to do it with a discipline and methodology to support them where need to. We don't want to make this available to any partner unless they are willing to make a strategic commitment to OpenView solutions."