Margin boost for VARs under Brocade scheme
Revamped programme will allow storage VARs to enjoy bigger margins, claims vendor
Storage VARs could earn a 30 per cent margin under its reworked programme, vendor Brocade has claimed.
Following its acquisition of McData, which quadrupled its number of VARs, Brocade has unveiled the Alliance Partner Network (APN).
Mark Porter, channel sales manager EMEA at Brocade, said:“We wanted to unite all our resellers and now that the acquisition has had time to bed in and we’ve had a good quarter, we want to put some of that investment back into the channel.”
The firm has recently made its entry into the File Area Network (FAN) space and to help encourage resellers to enter the arena, Brocade is offering margins of up to 30 per cent and joint marketing activities.
“We started in the FAN market about 18 months ago,” said Porter. “We wanted to enhance the programme in this space, so if resellers are a certified partner and they register a deal with us, they can get greater margins.”
The APN scheme has three levels. Partner is the entry level and resellers in this segment will receive technical and sales training, access to a web portal and incentives, said Porter.
The next level, Alliance Partner, is where the vendor intends to recruit heavily; it involves a revenue criteria, but offers resellers more resources.
Enterprise Alliance Partner is the top level and VARs can buy software direct from Brocade. Porter said the vendor is not actively perusing this route in the UK. Distributors for the firm include Bell Micro, ACAL and DNS Arrow.
Ed Shoemark, commercial product manager for Brocade at distributor ACAL Storage Networking, said it was heading in the right direction.
“Brocade seems to be capturing the right areas of the market following the acquisition and is offering the full end-to-end set of products,” he said. “We are working towards our FAN accreditation. Our business is going in that direction and it puts us in line with the needs of our resellers.”