Arrow, Pepperweed Offer OpenView Resources To VARs

Arrow has formalized a deal with Indianapolis-based Pepperweed Consulting, the largest U.S. reseller of OpenView, in which Arrow VARs can leverage Pepperweed's expertise for their customers.

In the past, Arrow has facilitated partnerships between several VARs with Pepperweed for successful projects on a one-off basis, but a new deal includes detailed terms and conditions and more, said Christopher Bolton, partner program manager at Pepperweed.

"We developed standard pricing and engagement processes. At one end of the spectrum, we have Arrow partners that have an OpenView practice they want to grow. At the other end are guys who don't have an OpenView practice and don't want one, but they run into opportunities and don't want to lose them," said Bolton, who joined Pepperweed last September to build the program.

Pepperweed doesn't sell hardware, so there's no threat of competition with customers, according to Bolton. "If we run into hardware [opportunities], we throw them back to the partners," he said.

Pepperweed has signed about 20 partnership deals, ranging from small shops to companies with more than $250 million in HP hardware sales, Bolton said. He estimated that the potential revenue in its OpenView pipeline generated from VAR partnerships has jumped to $20 million this year, from about $250,000 last year.

"In the past, we didn't have a focal point of management [around the partnerships]. Now it's more standardized, and we are formally pushing it in a proactive way," he said.

Jack Margossian, president of Comport Consulting, said the Ramsey, N.J.-based solution provider plans to leverage Pepperweed because it couldn't afford to start its own OpenView practice.

"It's too big of an investment to still maintain everything else we do. You pick your battles," Margossian said.

Comport Consulting has left OpenView opportunities on the table in the past. "We're selling [to end users] their EVA, servers and storage, but we didn't have the ability to do this. We haven't lost customers, but we have lost opportunities because we couldn't address it," Margossian said. "This program allows us to offer [OpenView] and keep [the account] under our control."

HP is in full support of the program, said Michael Haley, vice president of Arrow's HP business unit. At its recent OpenView conference, HP unveiled a partner-to-partner program that rewards resellers for sharing OpenView opportunities. In the past, HP only rewarded resellers for passing the leads back to HP.

"We had many meetings between Arrow, Pepperweed and [HP's] OpenView folks. We convinced them that the same program, partner to partner, would reap increased business opportunities for HP. A lot of our hard work has paid off," Haley said. "There's a whole lot of opportunities not being serviced by HP partners because of the investment [to sell OpenView]. You need significant investment to be in the software solutions business."

Building an OpenView practice has become more complex since HP started siloing the certifications needed for different parts of the suite, Bolton said.

"In the past, you were an OpenView partner and could sell and implement anything. Now you have to be network management-certified if you run into an operations opportunity. You have to find an operations-authorized partner to sell it," he said.

The new program also aligns with HP's directive to solution providers to sell a wider variety of HP solutions, Haley said.

"If you look at the enterprise partner community, Pepperweed fits into the HP goal of selling the entire portfolio of software, servers and storage and also our goal of looking at more profitable revenue streams for partners. We're excited about this opportunity," he said.