Channel Chiefs Sound Off On Partner Enablement

As part of the Channel 2.0 Project, a collaborative effort led by VARBusiness to map the channel through 2013 and beyond, VARBusiness editors met with a group of leading channel chiefs for their thoughts on the channel's evolution. Participating were Lori Cook, vice president of worldwide professional services, channels and alliances at BMC Software; Leonard Iventosch, vice president of channel sales at Network Appliance; Doug Kennedy, vice president of worldwide alliances and channels at Oracle; Kirk Robinson, vice president of North America channel marketing at Ingram Micro; and Frank Vitagliano, vice president of worldwide channels and U.S. enterprise operations at Juniper Networks.

To ensure the mutual success of their companies and solution providers, these channel chiefs see the need for greater collaboration, vendor-to-partner support, vertical and technical specialization, peer-to-peer partnering and more. Success, as you'll read, is a about what the community does as much as the individual vendors and solution providers.

VITAGLIANO: As time goes on, vendors have to do a better job in helping solution providers with their business models. I think what's happening is their business model has evolved over the years, and it's evolved from a scenario where there was just point product folks selling point products, if you will, to ones that are infinitely more solutions oriented. And those solutions include lots of things that they can provide in the form of services whether it's managed services or consulting, integration, etc. I think that will continue to evolve. And I think the differentiation will continue to evolve. And solution providers have to become experts in certain technologies and try not to spread themselves too thin.

Another piece that's very relevant is the need for more peer-to-peer partnering. If you believe that you have to become a specialist and you can't focus on every technology, then you better then figure out a way to find other folks in the marketplace who have a specialization in something else so that you can partner with them. And vendors have to figure out a way to facilitate that either through teaming, processes or referral processes or something.

IVENTOSCH: Looking at our partners as we go into the future, I think there is the table stakes, which is that you get yourself trained, you become as enabled as we can get you, and that generates the loyalty between the partner and the vendor. You become an expert, whether it's a technology or maybe it's a vertical market. You've got to develop a niche where the vendor sees that as a value and is additive to what they can do.

I think that most of us still have strong direct sales forces that are always asking the question, why shouldn't I just go do this myself because I can get it done faster? And I think partners are able to answer that question by saying we can get you somewhere where you can't go on your own. We can provide a complete solution, we can get you access to a deal that you don't even know about. Then you've created a value proposition that is unique and that will cause the vendor to want to get closer to you.

ROBINSON: We're definitely going to see more mergers and acquisitions over the next five years. There are a lot of the resellers that got into this business for one reason or another with not a lot of thought going into exit strategies or the valuation of their companies. I think the managed services play has changed that through the creation of recurring revenue. Value proposition is waking a lot of people up. That's why you're seeing so much noise around that.

COOK: I think that it comes back to helping partners build their value proposition. And I think in five years we will continue to see a consolidation in the market from a software vendor perspective. We're seeing a focused approach to the industry verticals that we support that we are not ever going to build skills in, or we're not currently building skills or capabilities in. It's very clear that a go-to partner that has telco capability versus a go-to partner that has health care capability, the opportunities that are in front of us and where we might more appropriately engage them.

KENNEDY: What we need to do then as a vendor is have a complete 360-degree view of these partners as well. Make sure they understand how to put their value propositions around where we're going as a corporation, but then we've got to keep track of who they are or how they're doing, revenue education they've taken, investments they've made, references they've got -- so that we can then reward the right partners and put them into the right business opportunities. And, more important, we can then identify the ones that we may need to step up on and bring up to another level in education.

Read more of what these channel chiefs had to say about the current state of the channel, breaking the classic 80/20 rule of business and how vendors and solution providers can best work together of mutual success next week as part of VARBusiness' 5-Star Partner Program Guide.

Also, read more about the Channel 2.0 Project, a collaborative effort lead by VARBusiness to map the IT reseller channel through 2013 and beyond.