It seems that every year technology vendors choose a new battle flag to raise, or a crusade to fight, if you will. According to the results of our recent 2008 Partner Programs Survey it appears that our noble knights of channels and alliance management have decided that enabling partners to better sell and service their solutions is their primary quest for 2008. This fact becomes obvious when you consider that this year’s survey identified partner enablement as the top priority by far amongst vendors with 58% of respondents ranking it as their highest priority. Other top initiatives included value-based partnering models ranked as the highest priority by 34% of respondents, partner recruitment with 31% of survey respondents indicating it was their #1 focus for 2008 and finally, 30% said "being easier to do business with" was their top priority in the coming year. Amazon Consulting focused a great deal of our conversation, research and content development over the past year on the topic of partner enablement. In our two-part series on the topic we define the process of enablement as a continuum rather than a finite set of activities or initiatives. When we consider that an impressive 78% of our survey respondents picked sales training as their top investment for 2008 over technical training and support, it seems that vendors are now looking further down the continuum of enablement and beyond the traditional definition of enabling partners as just product training and certification.

Adopting this expanded definition of enablement, especially in light of shrinking IT budgets and talent shortages, is exactly the type of “do less with more” approach that we believe vendor’s should be taking as we move into the New Year a bit apprehensive on which way the economy is going.

As vendors continue to invest in their partner’s overall sales skills and business acumen they create long term partner loyalty and success which, in the end, creates greater continuity for end-users. Join us for this week’s webinar where we’ll highlight further results of our 2008 Partner Programs survey We are also very excited to bring charter members of Amazon Consulting’s new Partner G2 subscription service a detailed report on the survey findings over the next few weeks. If you would like information on this valuable new service offering, I invite you to contact us to learn more.

CONSULTANT SPOTLIGHT

Certification That Makes Sense
By Bob Winters, Consultant, Amazon Consulting, LLC

I read an article the other day that described HP’s new certification incentive program for their storage and blade server elite partners. Seems that if partners in either of these elite categories also achieve certification as services elite or enterprise server elite, they are elevated to a higher level: data center elite. Once they do so, they receive double their “growth dollars” (read rebates).

It will be interesting to watch the uptake on this program. With or without the incentives, I think partners will find value in being certified for an infrastructure solution in addition to individual products. End-users want “one throat to choke” accountability for mission critical architectures like their data centers.

Of particular interest will be how many more HP services elite partners this adds to the mix, since the gap between supply and demand of cost-effective data center services is big and growing. In a report made public late last year, Symantec Corp. found that the Global 2000 will have spent more than $6.6 billion annually on data center management services in 2007. The biggest expenses: staffing and managing the growing complexity of corporate data centers. And while the demand for these services is expanding, the budgets most likely are not. Sounds to me like a great opportunity for channel partners who can introduce efficiency into the process.
Read on

About the Author:
Industry Expertise:

• Routes-to-Market
• Partner Enablement
• Globalization of Programs

• Director of Development for CMP's IPED division (Institute for Partner Education and Development)
• Director of Worldwide Market Intelligence, EMC Corporation