At its annual Net@Work Conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., MOCA announced not one, not two, but three channel programs for its VAR network.
At the top of the list is Hi-Rez, a marketing and sales development program, which will be offered as part of MOCA’s MAP (Marketing Assistance Program). HI-Rez is designed to spark the sales process for Sun Microsystems Inc. VARs, according to Rich Severa, president of MOCA.
“Hi Rez is not geographically limited. It does not look any different for Canadians as opposed to Americans. It goes end-to-end and Hi Rez is about measuring results so that monies spent can be funneled where it makes a difference,” he said.
Severa added that MOCA is trying to help partners to sell “deeper or wider” in geographic areas and identify prospects and retain current end-user customers.
One of the main components of Hi-Rez is a Webcast service, which features live, Web-based audio-visual communications for presentations and training.
“The Webcast service, I think, differentiates us from the only other Unix distributor and Sun player in the market (GE Access).”
Also announced was InvestStart, a three-pronged program to encourage resellers to re-invest in Sun’s services and storage products. The three areas of InvestStart are Jumpstart, ServiceStart and Storage InvestStart.
Jumpstart is aimed at newly authorized Sun resellers. It helps them identify leads, create demand in the market place. Each reseller in JumpStart gets a $5,000 marketing budget that MOCA holds and manages. This money is then used for list procurement, direct mail and
telemarketing.
As with JumpStart, ServiceStart also offers more marketing funds, but to those resellers who sell Sun’s Enterprise services.
With Storage InvestStart, Sun resellers, who have less than $1 million in Sun storage sales in the past six months, will also receive procurement and marketing funds to boost their storage business.
“(InvestStart) is for Sun VARs who plan to move up the route from workgroup to enterprise level solutions. It gets them authorized and gets them into bigger products,” Severa said.
The finally piece of MOCA’s reseller offering is Vortex 2.0, an on-line e-management tool designed exclusively for MOCA customers. With this version of Vortex, Severa said, it will enable VARs to gain around the clock access to high-level sales and demand generation data.
With Vortex, resellers will be able to access current leads, product timelines, and electronic versions of direct mailers, telemarketing scripts and a list of leads.
“There is resiliency in our VAR base,” Severa said referring to the IT spending slowdown and how it has affect MOCA VARs. “The resiliency is much deeper than they are getting credit for. The first PC was released about 20 years and many VARs have their history formed there. They have showed remarkable resiliency. Canadian resellers have not mirrored the U.S. You do not see a lot of new reseller but their health is good.”