The Lindon, Utah-based systems management vendor currently gets 80% of its revenue from partners, with the majority of that coming from original equipment manufacturers such as Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV.
OEMs account for 58% of the company’s revenue, according to EMEA marketing director Toni Adams. But with 34% coming from smaller VARs, the company is taking steps to manage its relationships and ensure that larger partners are not undercutting the smaller ones.
We are a partner company. We want our revenues, regardless of where they come from, to come from our partners, said Adams. But we still have to look after each one of our partners. Because we are so small as a company but our partner base is so big, what we are looking at doing is value-added distribution, with help in presale, consulting, maintenance, and support.
He added: From a growth perspective there are certain things we can do to put things into place to cope with partner growth. We do not just remunerate transactional partners, we also reward service partners. Our business model requires a level of consulting and support.
The result is a new framework that rewards business partners not only through sales-related achievements, but also the submission of deployment and management best practices and customers sales leads.
There are different buying criteria. The majority of people buy through recommendation. Even in the biggest deals there will be a recommendation from the likes of Dell or HP or Fujistu Siemens, said Adams.
With an increasingly broad set of partners to manage, Altiris has also brought in a new portal-based customer relationship management system through which large and small partners can view sales leads and ensure that they work together to meet customer requirements.
It’s not the core competency of Dell or HP to management software, they are a tremendous instrument for going to market, but we are always involved in closing the deal, Adams said.
Altiris has had some partner management of its own to do in the last year since one of its main partners, HP, acquired competitor Novadigm Inc in February 2004 to boost its OpenView systems management suite.
Since then, HP’s hardware business has continued to ship Altiris’s management software on its ProLiant hardware, and Dave Johnson, Altiris product manager for service management, said the company is careful to protect its lucrative relationship with the company. If we approach a deal with HP, we make sure we provide what HP needs. We refuse to compete with HP on that, he said.
Adams said that while Altiris can scale higher, the relationship with HP often focuses on smaller deployments. Below 5,000 nodes, that’s where we feel particularly comfortable, he said. There are instances where we have to work together. It’s all a matter of communication and positioning.
