Bay Soothes Channel with Support Pledge
Vendor responds to channel criticism by promising to provide more marketing backup for its resellers in branding initiative
Bay Networks is pledging to beef up its marketing for channel partners after coming under fire for not providing enough backup.
Previously, distributors and resellers have criticised Bay, claiming that its branding was weak and that there was a lack of a global unified message from the company.
Graeme Allen, Bay UK sales and marketing director, conceded that the firm had not spent as much money as 3Com and Cisco, but pledged to increase customer sales numbers by up to six.
?Our competitors have sales models based on the current size of their businesses. I?m sure our partners would love us to have more people, but until they help us to grow we cannot do that. The sales and marketing side will grow according to continuing revenue growth.?
At last week?s briefing of European channel partners in Paris, Bay underlined its commitment to increase marketing with the appointment of 3Com veteran Chris Unsworth as director of European marketing.
Unsworth, who came on board from Fore Sytems, began in the same week as Bay announced a long-term global branding and positioning intiative called Adaptive Networking, a white paper on technology trends and IT decisions aimed at encouraging the user to make the right decisions about their IT strategies.
Chris Young, Bay product manager at distributor Unity, said the company had lost credibility with users in the past year because Bay?s reseller marketing support was thin in the ground. But Young welcomed Bay?s pledge to remedy the situation.
?It is promising us a lot more support. Its Adaptive Networking strategy is very strong and visionary. It still can?t be compared to 3Com, which has a knack of steamrolling the marketplace, but its hype up campaign in Paris has given a really positive feedback to the channel.?