Symbol Changes Reflect A 'Keep It Simple' Philosophy

Over the next few weeks, the wireless and mobility company will collapse its existing set of 44 different pricing discount strategies into a framework that offers a maximum of four—striving to make things simpler for partners and also reduce the number of price exceptions associated with deals, Symbol executives said.

Moreover, Symbol in April plans to announce several other changes to its PartnerSelect program, including fewer authorization tiers for solution providers and an ISV program under which it hopes to better link ISVs to solution providers and systems integrators.

"We're wanting to formalize and improve the support we give to current ISVs and attract other ISVs who are writing software for our platform," said Jan Burton, vice president of worldwide channels at Holtsville, N.Y.-based Symbol. This works for Tom Robinson, executive vice president of sales at Odyssey Software, Rochester, N.Y., who said that as an ISV, Odyssey welcomes a program that "gives more hardware-centric partners a way to link with the software community."

Symbol already has made some pretty profound changes on behalf of its channel. Not only has the $1.7 billion vendor grown the share of revenue contributed by partners to 66 percent from 42 percent in the past year, it has also turned back to the channel some $50 million in professional services business it used to handle itself.

And while it doesn't have a hard deck of accounts where its direct-sales team will focus, it pays bigger commissions for deals cultivated through joint calls between Symbol sales representatives and go-to channel partners.

"Our partners are truly an extension of our enterprise, of our company," Nuti said. "I view partners as an absolute connected extension to Symbol Technologies."

Two major priorities in 2005 will include further rationalization of its product portfolio down to about 3,000 SKUs; it used to support close to 17,000. And Symbol will actively reach out to solution providers with broader knowledge of network design, management and managed services. Currently, it has roughly 7,000 partners in North America; about 325 solution providers maintain close, active relationships.