Tech Data Enhances E-Biz Tools To Track Licenses, Contract Renewals
Tech Data also has now enhanced the tool so that solution providers can manually input service contract information for products bought directly from vendors or from other distributors in order to receive renewal notifications, said Doug Riccardi, Tech Data's director of e-business.
"This feature we're adding was in response to customer demand. They have the ability to input for warranty service, warranty add-on or renewal. They can call it a custom opportunity," he said. "We also have mini-CRM features, small-scale features for them to modify and maintain priorities, add notes. There's a number of things they can do to manage their workflow and their daily activities selling out to these accounts. It makes it easier to manage these opportunities."
Vendors supported by MyOpportunityTracker include: ADTRAN, APC, Apple, Avocent, Brocade, Brother, CA, Canon, Diskkeeper, Eaton, Enterasys, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Kodak, Lenovo, Lexmark, Microsoft, Nortel, QLogic, Ricoh, Red Hat, SolarWinds, SonicWALL, Toshiba, Tripp Lite, WatchGuard, WYSE Technology and Xerox.
Tech Data launched the program with MyOrderTracker about two years ago. That gave solution provides the ability to automatically notify customers when products were being shipped, and the ability for customers to track them. Last May, the distributor launched MyOpportunityTracker and last November it debuted MyLicenseTracker, which helps VARs track software licenses.
"MyOpportunityTracker came out of our data mining heritage. We're always looking for demand generation opportunities for our VARs. We found this low-hanging piece of fruit. The tool mines through prior purchases to the reseller and we look for things that need to be renewed," Riccardi said.
Tech Data has not tracked how many more service renewals it has as a result of the tool, but it is a both a hit with VARs and vendors, he said.
"We're probably three-quarters through our road map for expanding. In 30 weeks, we've gone from zero to 30-plus vendors," Riccardi said. "We started the month of January with 40,000 opportunities. Now we're at 50,000. Those are continuing to grow. That's across the 120-day window of visibility. In the next 6 or 8 weeks, we will continue to march down the software licensing path, to expand the number of vendors there. Beyond that we have not formalized a road map, but we have a number of things we're kicking around. We will continue the data mining model."