Partner Enablement
Avaya and Cisco Systems bump up against each other frequently in the IP communications field. Now, the vendors are each putting together new channel initiatives that executives from both sides said will help grow their partners' sales and profitability.
One of Cisco's top three company-wide priorities for this fiscal year is a deeper focus on partner enablement, said Keith Goodwin, senior vice president of worldwide channels at Cisco, San Jose, Calif.
As evidence of its commitment, Cisco is doubling its investment in channel partner training in fiscal 2007 compared with fiscal 2006, and creating a new dedicated partner training organization led by Liz Lawson, Cisco's senior director of partner development and education.
"In the past, we would determine how to train the Cisco field and then we would determine how to adapt it to Cisco partners," Goodwin said. "Now, we're trying to understand the needs and requirements of our partners and ensuring that as we develop training concepts and training delivery vehicles, that we're doing [it] in a partner-focused way."
As a result, partners will see fresh training content with a focus on new technology, as well as how to sell it.
Cisco also plans to make more training content available online through its Partner E-Learning program. Partners also can expect more training to be ready simultaneously with new product launches, he said.
"Cisco recognizes that the human part of it—from training to support—is critical to our continued growth," said Mont Phelps, president of NWN, a solution provider in Waltham, Mass. "We're all growing so rapidly, especially in the advanced technologies, that we have to continue [training] to expand."
One reason partner enablement is taking on such importance this year for Cisco is that the company has just launched a new marketing campaign focused on "the human network," a concept the vendor will rely heavily on channel partners to position and sell to customers, Goodwin said.
"As the network becomes the platform for all communication, we really move from thinking about the network historically as a network of personal computers moving data to really a human network focused on collaboration," he said. Marketing materials built around the new campaign will be available to partners in January, he said.
The new training effort will help partners deliver the types of solutions customers today are demanding, he said.
Cisco rival Avaya also sees an opportunity to deliver high-value, intelligent IP communication solutions that enable collaboration and is rolling out a new partner program to prepare its channel to grab it.
About one week into its fiscal 2007, Avaya last week unveiled its new Global Alliance Program at its sales fiscal kickoff meeting in New Orleans, an event that included about 1,000 channel partners. At the conference, President and CEO Louis D'Ambrosio said the Basking Ridge, N.J.-based company this year will put more emphasis on teaming with its channel partners.
"The theme to our kickoff meeting this year is 'the power of one,' and the power of one takes on many different meanings. It's the power of one, integrating across our company, between ourselves and our business partners and having the full team aligned around a common play," D'Ambrosio said during a conference call with journalists.
Avaya is preparing for a future where intelligent communications will be embedded into the core business processes of its customers, a scenario that will see the company rely more heavily on software as a bigger piece of its IP telephony platform, D'Ambrosio said.
As part of that strategy, Avaya will seek to extend contact center functionality to a broader range of users, he said. "There are nine million contact center agents in the world, but there are 100 million enterprise workers in the world who interact with customers, and there's no reason why those hundred million workers can't have the same type of value applications at their fingertips as those that the contact center agents have," he said.
Through its new umbrella program, Avaya is dividing its partner program into four segments: a Business Partner program for national and regional VARs; an Alliance Partner program for systems integrators, outsourcers and service providers; a Consultant Relations program for IT consultants; and a DevConnect program for developers.
Avaya's sales reps also are in the process of completing mandated account and territory planning by the end of this month, an effort that "will force the direct sales team to figure out which portions of their named accounts aren't being covered with Avaya resources," said Ken Archer, vice president of North American indirect sales at Avaya. As a result, channel partners will be brought into account opportunities they haven't touched before, he said.