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Newsletter Home > March, 2008
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Alcatel-Lucent Moves to Extend Partner Services Reach
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Alcatel-Lucent has signed a global services agreement with NCR Corporation to provide help desk, field engineering, parts logistics, SLA management, and network operations center services to channel partners for resale to enterprise customers on a 24x7 worldwide basis.
The services to be provided by NCR under the Alcatel-Lucent brand will cover over 15 languages and more than 130 countries with a network of more than 10,000 service professionals.
The move, which is the extension of an ongoing relationship with NCR, is designed to help partners compete for larger, worldwide projects, and also to help Alcatel-Lucent expand its installed base, according to Stuart Cooper, vice president of Worldwide Services in the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group.
"The cost of maintenance and the price of maintenance in the enterprise market is bring driven downwards by the customers who are expecting lower and lower prices," explained Cooper. This service basically augments the service of our channels. We are not selling this service directly. We are selling it to the channel which enables them to be able to meet the needs of multinational companies around the world and be able to compete in those areas."
Cooper added that the partnership will also be used to support the efforts of Alcatel-Lucent's professional services unit involving large integrations with complex customizations involving applications being designed by Alcatel-Lucent. "We're building specific applications for customers around call routing applications, fixed/mobile convergence, notifications for emergencies, and built by us. In those situations it's more effective to do our own deployment and integration."
For channel partners, the revenue opportunity is more closely tied to the increased number of sales opportunities available through a worldwide reach, as opposed to the ability to mark-up the NCR services being resold.
"I don't believe the partners will be able to put huge margin on top of this, but they'll be able to win more business by being able to respond to more RFPs than they were able to do before," Cooper said.
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Nortel's New Program Enhancements
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Most of the news around Nortel these days has been around bad financials, layoffs, and reports that neither of these unfortunate incidents interfered with the CEO's ability to pocket more money than he did before.
Meanwhile, work continues on the company's plan of record to upgrade the Nortel channel program, which was the subject of the Enterprise Partner Forum last month.
Announcements at the partner meeting included enhancements to the deal registration program, originally launched in March of 2007. In addition to rewarding partners for bringing new partners into the fold, the upgraded program now provides incentives for bringing customers into new product segments, such as moving customers from TDM to data. Other motivators for bringing in larger deals were also added to the mix.
"Overall, we're getting positive feedback on the program changes an especially the predictability associated with having a two-year plan of record," said North America marketing director, John Stasick.
Through this roadmap, Nortel has rolled out specializations for unified communications, advanced services, and the small-to-medium business market. As this newsletter was being prepared for distribution, a new specialization focused on data infrastructure was imminent, according to Nortel executives.
Each specialization has a sales/marketing component, a technical competency component, and usually requires a given number of customer installations. For example, the SMB specialization requires 160 engagements as demonstrated through an SLA, maintenance agreement, or other contract that governs an ongoing relationship.
Though Nortel officials express satisfaction with the progress, channel uptake on the specializations has been variable.
"A large majority of our partners have been voice-centric," Stasick explained. "They do have to make some investment and figure out how to adjust their business models to get payback in the UC space. Our program is designed to make that transition easier."
Nortel also reports a doubling of SMB-focused channel partners, based on recruitment efforts, enhanced relationships with DMRs and increased efforts by distributors who are rewarded for swinging channel partners towards Nortel. The company's alliance with Microsoft has also been helpful in this respect.
Cisco Capital Announces New UC Pricing Strategy for SMBs
Cisco Capital has rolled out a per-user-per-day leasing strategy intended to help the channel sell unified communications to small-to-medium businesses through a program called Cisco Easy Lease.
Pricing packages are based on the number of users and the term of the contract, but can run less than a dollar-per-user-per-day. Hardware, software, and support services are included in the solution.
Cisco Capital has also enhanced the "grow i.t." partner portal, which contains Cisco Capital programs, offers, tools, training and collateral to make it easier for channel partners to create finance quotes, auto-generate documentation, and understand and take advantage of financing in their sales cycles. New partner resources include:
- An updated self-service online commercial quoting tool that allows partners to generate their own customized per-user-per-day pricing quotes
- Co-brandable partner marketing materials
- A series of brief videos on demand (VoDs) on the grow i.t. partner portal covering financing trends, financing basics, sales strategies, Cisco Capital offers and partner programs, and partner engagement
- An updated Cisco Capital operations guide
Cisco's Linksys Division Fires Worldwide Channel VP
In a move presented as a strategy shift favoring geographic sales teams, Cisco's Linksys division has dismissed Nigel Williams, a long-time Cisco channel veteran who most recently served as Linksys' worldwide channel vice president.
A Linksys spokesperson said the position was eliminated because responsibility for the channel program is being moved to the geographical regions, but Linksys would not elaborate on those plans.
In the U.S., the channel Sales team will now be under the umbrella of Bob Gregerson, vice president Retail and Canada Sales. Allen Powell, senior director of channel operations will report to Gregerson. The channel marketing team is moving under the umbrella of Marna Bullard, vice president of worldwide marketing, and will be led by Robert Auci, senior director of channel marketing.
Network Critical Names Managing Director for the Americas
Network Critical, a UK-based carrier-grade access technology vendor, announced that Christopher Bihary has been named Managing Director of the Americas.
Bihary, who has been with the company since 2005, will be responsible for all operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico and South America while also serving as the chief liaison for Network Critical's global operations based in the United Kingdom. In this new leadership role, he will focus on growing the North and South American markets and will oversee the development of new products to better serve these and other specialized markets.
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On The Other Hand - Tis the Season; the Other Season
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By: Ken Presti
Never mind the calendar, and never mind the weather report. Spring is in the air. I know this must be true because of all the channel conferences on the schedule. This time of the year brings a fine opportunity to hob-nob with executives from your favorite vendors, pick up some roadmap information on product lines and programs, and maybe kick in with a little feedback yourself.
Just like Johnny Carson used to have his "Karnak" character who could predict what was written in sealed envelopes, here are the main talking points for just about any of the partner conferences you might be planning to attend:
#1 Services:
In a world of open standards and interconnectedness, it gets harder and harder to differentiate based on technology alone. So the push continues toward moving the channel toward making their money on a variety of professional services, managed services, or basically anything else that makes you the partner less reliant on pure product margins. As a basic pitch, this is not especially new. But many vendors are raising the stakes by offering incentives for a stronger services practice, and allowing those who don't to more-or-less languish in their own inertia. As an inherent part of the value-over-volume trend, this is more than an issue of profit margins, it's about Number Two in our list.
#2 Getting in Tune with Customer Business Problems
Sometimes channel partners feel a little bit dissed by this piece of advice, which is arguably the biggest no-brainer of the technology industry. "Do you really think we could have stayed in business if we were not in tune with the customer's business needs?," they ask. Well, sort of. But herein lies the difference. Back in the bubble days, technology uptake and the enabling budgets were so strong that the mere promise of good results would often lead to P.O.s. Sometimes those promises did lead to good results; other times, maybe not. But the strong economy and emerging connectedness of companies and business processes kept things humming right along. Salespeople could sell based on the latest and greatest, and on much more of a product-by-product basis than they can now. Today's IT purchaser is much more skeptical. They're more likely to dig more deeply into the economics behind the purchase and, whatever they buy, the certainly want it to integrate well with whatever's already on the network. So the channel partner is becoming far more consultative, and needs to understand more about the problems the customer's management is really focused on solving.
This is another big emphasis in partner conferences nowadays, and it leads us to…
#3 Applications
Yes, you're used to hearing about applications from all the applications vendors out there. But more recently, the infrastructure players have jumped on this bandwagon, as well. Issues #1 and #2 basically boil down to solution-selling, and that makes the application the star of the show. So effective integration and network optimization emerge as popular themes.
#4: Ease of Doing Business
As vendors work to make their channel programs more comprehensive, the complexity of those programs tends to get jacked-up by several orders of magnitude. This has not been a popular outcome within the channel, and the vendors have clearly gotten the message. So streamlining and efficiency are now viewed as equal in importance to building comprehensive programs.
#5 Closing/Widening the Gap
This one depends on market space and exactly who the vendor is. But I can almost guarantee you'll hear about closing the gap on Brand X, who will probably be identified with some safely vague descriptor that can't be misidentified. Unless, of course, you're at the Brand X conference, at which you'll hear the promise to stay one to three years ahead of the rest of the market.
So watch this year become the great exception to all these predictions. I doubt it will happen, but let me add one more prediction about what you'll find, just in case. My cheap imitation of Karnak predicts…..Free beer and wine!
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