By Ramdas S
As a part of the newly announced channel sales program Novell PartnerNet, Novell India plans to revamp its channel strategy. Starting November, Novell is promising a complete overhaul of its partner engagement program.
Over the past few years Novell, once synonymous with networking software, has completely reinvented itself as an infrastructure software vendor. It now has products for data center, virtualization, security, identity management, groupware and collaboration. “We want channels to recognize the opportunity and work with us. We are evolving a very compelling channel sales engine to support them,” informed Kent Erickson Senior Vice President & General Manager, Workgroup Solutions, Novell.
In the last two years, Novell channel business had taken a back seat as the company was busy restructuring and regrouping its product portfolio to emerge as a total solutions company. Currently, the company has only 25 tier-1 partners, and 75 tier-2 partners managed by its distributors Redington and Inflow Technologies, a small number compared to the large base it had in the past.
“Our channel focus has been limited to only a few partners over the past two years due to restructuring and realignment of business. However, these partners are extremely focused on our solutions and have bagged some major deals for us. We too have worked very closely with them to build proof of concepts for our products to make a compelling case for our technologies,” said Sandeep Menon, Country Head, Novell India.
Novell India claims to have had some major wins in the banking, government and education sector in the past several months. “We have seen significant business for our enterprise Linux desktop in the large and high-spending sectors like BFSI, government and education. Even our legacy Netware business has been strong,” said Menon.
Under the new channel program, Novell will list out accounts that will be managed by partners. The company will also appoint dedicated account managers to manage partner relationships.
“Till now, we dealt directly with the customer in many of the large enterprise accounts. The partner was only required to manage the fulfilment. However, this is going to change with the new program. Partners will now be able to address most large accounts by themselves. We will soon be releasing the list of named accounts that will be partner led. Also these accounts will be mapped to partners based on their industry focus and technology expertise. Dedicated account managers will help partners manage these large accounts and provide them all the enablement required,” explained Menon.
Highlighting the partner benefits under the new Partnernet initiative Menon said, “Partners will get clearly defined market development funds and be eligible for training and certification at almost negligible cost.” |