Why it Pays to Invest in a 5-Star Channel Partner Program (Part 2)

The proliferation of the Internet of Things, mobile technologies, connected solutions and associated services has opened up a wealth of new opportunities for Channel partners. To discuss this further, I sat down with Gene Esopi, president, SOVA; Tim Acker, vice president, mobility, SYNNEX and Adam Famularo, vice president, global channels, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. Here's the second part of our candid conversation discussing what it takes to succeed in today's Channel and the importance of partner programs. (Read Part 1)

Tim Acker, Vice President, Mobility, SYNNEX

Acker: We are very active in this co-sell/sell-with model. We are actually on location with the customer, at the end-user site talking to them about opportunities to bring in machine-to-machine-based technologies, whether they are security, monitoring services, video, etc. Once we build a solution, we go all in with a partner. The traditional method has always been to give the components a reseller needs and let them go implement it, and wish them good luck.

That’s not how we do business today. We are much more active in implementing solutions together and then bringing the reference examples back to national platforms that we have in our event stream. We show our partners practical examples of how we help, what the enablement path looks like, and very specifically, how that changed the relationship between the reseller and the end user.

Famularo: We are having different levels of conversation with our customers. We try to figure out what the right bundles are to bring to market that will deliver complete M2M, mobility or IoT solutions for resellers, and then we work directly with our resellers to build business plans based on their expertise. What you want to be careful with, as a vendor, is that you are not just trying to push more products. What you are trying to do is work more closely with each individual member to better understand the strengths they bring to market for their customer, and how we marry them with ours to deliver something unique in the marketplace. That's really where businesses thrive.

Gene Esopi, President, SOVA

Esopi: The real opportunity for our traditional partners is to expand their current offerings using some of the new wireless opportunities that Verizon is offering. We have partners that have built out private wireline networks. They now have the opportunity to extend that into a private wireless network and back up the wireline with the wireless as well. There is a tremendous advantage to moving those two technologies together, not only in terms of solutions, but in terms of expanded reach of an enterprise's network.

With all these new devices and applications going on the network, there is clearly a need for stronger, more bandwidth-intensive network solutions. Do businesses realize that?

Esopi: That's our job and the job of our partners. A good partner will be in front of the customer driving that discussion early on and often, because you do see resistance in some organizations to move out of their comfort zones. In other organizations, you see a very aggressive posture where they are looking and pushing all the time to be on the cutting edge of technology, because they believe it brings value to their core business. Networks have been around for a number of years now and companies have become more and more reliant on both public and private networks and at this point everyone has experienced an outage, so they kind of get it. They know that quality of service and quality of network — both wireline and wireless — are becoming more and more important.

Adam Famularo, Vice President, Global Channels, Verizon Enterprise Solutions

Acker: Bringing more devices and driving traffic on the network is a classic example of how this feeds the ultimate objective. Customers bring more tablets, phones and other connected devices onto a Wi-Fi network and the traffic on the broader network increases. This creates a flywheel effect where I'm selling mobility solutions and also creating bandwidth and infrastructure opportunities. These two things go hand in hand. The reseller is able to take those examples and build out broader infrastructure and technology roadmaps for the customer. BYOD is just an entry point. Think about video and the need for surveillance on the network — these solutions are bandwidth hungry applications. It's forcing a conversation with the end-user around redesigning their network.

Is this also opening up opportunities for resellers to sell adjacent technologies, so they can own more of the pie?

Acker: I think it's allowing them to slowly expand. But our advice to VARs is that when building a business, stay focused on the technologies that you can execute on. Don't try to be all things to all people. While I do think it does open up some adjacencies, it's hard to crossover into some of these markets when you don't have expertise out of the gate. We also have the ability to do delivery and work on behalf of partners. If a partner doesn't have a specialty in a certain area they can use us as their extended bench. They can bring in assets from Synnex, they can bring in assets from Verizon, but the final product is still wrapped around their primary solutions.

Famularo: We see members are teaming up with other solution providers that have specialties in the network space to bridge the gap. It's definitely encouraging, because in the end, we just want to make sure that the customer is getting the best solution. Knowing that members are willing and able to work with other providers to build complete solutions is a great sign.

For years we've been talking about moving towards a service-based business model with recurring revenue model. How is that transition going? How is it changing the products being offered?

Famularo: Cloud has really driven a major change in most of our members’ business models. We've provided usage-based pricing models, especially for our cloud-based services that our members can align to the different product portfolios that they offer today. This was a much bigger issue three to five years ago, and I think the channel has come a long way. Partners like SOVA and Synnex have done a significant job helping members bridge the gap between selling perpetual versus selling usage-based software, hardware and services.

Esopi: We are talking to many of our partners about lifecycle management of network services as an additional revenue stream. We have some traditional agents that make a living doing that today, and we are trying to introduce that model into the VAR/MSP partner relationship. We track contract expiry dates and similar types of information and pass it through to our partners, but we also encourage them to do some of that management themselves.

We have some partners go so far as to review client bills every month to ensure they are correct, and sign off on them before they go to accounts payable — that’s all part of their value add. There are companies that are selling millions of Microsoft licenses and managing when they are expiring, and we are talking to them about managing carrier services that same way. That ensures that they are out in front of that curve and have the opportunity to work with new technologies as they come to market and there's been quite a bit of interest in that.

Acker: What's really changed in terms of the engagement is that today, network, bandwidth and technology upgrades are no longer a one-time capex event — it's a continuum. Solution providers that have made the transition to a services-led model are going back to customers and having this continuous conversation about how to stay ahead of the curve on the entire platform, across these technologies.

Managed security is a great example. That's the type of product that rides on top of the network and generates so many opportunities to do things like increase bandwidth, add BYOD applications, offer solution implementation and on-premise services versus on-cloud services. These products are driving new conversations, new billing events and new ways for customers to consume this technology, and service providers have really embraced this change.

Visit Verizon News & Insights to read the first part of this candid conversation.