A Toronto-based co-location provider has unveiled a new channel program, promising to pay up to 10 per cent commission of net revenues per customer for its top partners.
“”There’s certainly been a demand from our (partner) customer base to expand the breadth of the offering to them,”” said Robert
Offley, president and CEO of Fusepoint Managed Services Inc.
Fusepoint offers co-location, firewall, load-balancing and fully managed services for mid-sized companies.
Until now the three-year old startup, which raised US$20 million of venture financing during the Internet boom to build data centres in Toronto and Vancouver, had a referral program with a few partners such as system integrators as a way of getting customers.
But it has decided to create formal a three-tier program called Fusion Select, Premier and Elite. While all will get free training and sales tools, only Elite partners will get certain co-branded material. They will also have sales quotas.
“”We’re not just bolting the channel onto our business,”” said Offley. “”It’s a very important part of our growth in ’03.””
Currently about 25 per cent of the company’s business comes from partner referrals, he said. “”I expect that to grow 60 per cent and above in the next 12 months. A lot of it depends on finding the right channel partners and getting an effective market coverage model. I’m not looking for five people doing the same thing in the same market and creating a channel conflict situation. I’m looking for a meticulous way of covering the market.””
He wants to build a plan with a partner to go after specific markets – for example, customer relationship management integration in Ontario — or vertical, such as manufacturing.
Fusepoint also announced it is adding a professional services arm to its offerings, including system migration and integration, security reviews and audits, network architecture design, disaster recovery planning and intranet/extranet optimization.