Ardent sets out to woo channel

Software Vendor introduces three-tier accreditation programme to boost sales of data warehousing products.

Date management vendor Ardent Software is courting resellers as partst sales of data warehousing products. of a drive to increase its data warehousing revenue through the channel to 40 per cent.

Ardent, which was formed last year by the merger of VMARK Software, Unidata and O2 Technology - and has recently completed the acquisition of Prism Solutions - has launched a three-tier alliance programme targeted at systems integrators, Vars and OEMs.

Kim Lewin, vice president for Northern Europe at Ardent, told PC Dealer: 'Following the creation of Ardent last year and the subsequent acquisitions, we have been building a base. The faster we can expand our market share, the faster we will win in this sector, but we need bandwidth to do this.

'Every company is talking about business intelligence in some form and we need to talk to those businesses. We can't do it by ourselves - that's why we need Vars,' he added.

Ardent has already signed up Berkshire consultancy The Business Intelligence Group and London systems integrator CACI as entry-level partners and plans to add another six resellers by the end of the year.

The vendor will also be looking to strengthen its OEM alliances. Ardent already has agreements with Sybase, Bull, Informix and Compaq, but Lewin said the vendor was also talking to companies such as Oracle and ICL.

Partners will pay pounds 6,000 to join the programme and will work alongside Ardent's direct sales force. Peter Cook, channel sales director at Ardent, acknowledged that this opened the potential for channel conflict.

'We want to run a flexible model. There will be conflict, but we don't want partners owning customers. If we support our channel then we can work to minimise any difficulties,' he said.

Frances Harless, director of consultancy services at The Business Intelligence Group, said the structure of Ardent's alliance partner programme - with higher sales rewarded by a higher level of accreditation - had attracted the company's interest.

'Ardent is a partner friendly business and 80 per cent of our business comes from partnerships, so that was also key to our decision to sign up,' she added.