VARs Excited About BMC Patrol Express Channel Promotions

The promotions, grouped together in an effort dubbed the Patrol Express Monitoring in Minutes campaign, include vendor-assisted lead generation, co-marketing and a 4 percent rebate on gross sales for certified channel partners.

William Donahoo, BMC's director of worldwide channel development and marketing, said the promotions are designed to introduce the infrastructure monitoring product to small and midsize businesses. The promotions, which end March 31, coincide with BMC's fourth quarter for fiscal 2003, raising suspicion among some solution providers that the effort may also be an end-of-year sales push.

"It's the end of their year, they're trying to bring up sales on this product, and this is a cost-effective way for them to generate sales activity in the channel," said Mike Anderson, vice president of business development at Infospectrum, a BMC-certified services provider in Wheaton, Ill. "What better way to get the reseller community to focus on a product like this than to incent us?"

Donahoo declined to explain the timing of the promotions but noted that this is not the first time Houston-based BMC has run channel promotions to sell solutions to specific audiences, citing as examples previous programs for server consolidation and SQL-BackTrack offerings.

"Two years ago, BMC was a direct business," he said. "With promotions like these, the message to partners is to check us out."

BMC solution providers said they are delighted at the opportunity to earn rebate money on a product so popular that it essentially sells itself. Anderson estimated that Infospectrum could score as much as $15,000 through the rebate program.

"That's nothing to sneeze at for business we would have been doing anyway," Anderson said. "This is a legitimate promotion that will have major impact in the channel."

J. Scott Lowry, executive vice president of MRK Technologies, Cleveland, agreed, saying Patrol Express comprises about 20 percent of his company's business. Lead-generation efforts could help increase that number significantly, he said.