Avanton Touts 'Alive At Five' Deal-Registration Program

Avanton's "Alive At Five" program, launched last month, operates around a deal-registration component that requires partners at all levels to have each of their sales representatives produce five solid leads per quarter. In turn, partners who meet the quota can expect Avanton's channel managers and direct-sales team to work in concert with them to make every lead pay off, said Chuck Watkins, newly hired chief sales officer for Avanton, Manhattan Beach, Calif.

"We have eliminated all the heavy lifting that comes with the traditional partner/VAR relationship," Watkins said. Greg Coggin, president and CEO of Triple C Technologies, a VAR in Greer, S.C., said the partnership builds on his sales force's strengths. "They will do the legwork. You can't beat that," he said. "It's taking the abilities of my salespeople and enhancing them with a direct relationship to the product."

Partners who register leads with Avanton under the Alive At Five program own those accounts. All sales will be fulfilled through partners even if the Avanton sales force closes the deal, Watkins said.

A startup, Avanton's flagship product is its ReadyARM appliance, which is targeted at the midmarket and performs network monitoring, intrusion-detection alerting and reporting, vulnerability scanning and report correlation. Built to handle environments ranging from 100 to 1,000 seats, ReadyARM is priced from about $10,000, according to Avanton.

Alive At Five is a three-tiered program that offers partners margins as high as 40 percent at the Platinum level. Gold-level partners get margins in the 35 per- cent range, and Silver partners enjoy margins in the 25 percent range. Only Silver-level partners are exempt from having to purchase a ReadyARM demo unit, Watkins said.

Avanton currently has about 25 partners and is looking to double that number in the next six months, he said. All partners that don't meet the quota for leads will be booted from the program, Watkins said.