In addition to the VIP Reseller program, other VMware partner programs are growing along with their administrative and infrastructure needs. These programs have common processes, systems and tasks that result in duplicate efforts. Automated systems and personnel that would increase effectiveness, efficiency and partner satisfaction likely can be shared by the various programs and this should be considered when making an investment decision.
The manual systems or in-house IT systems that support the current partner program are not able to keep pace with the growing number of partners and their increasing demands. We need to invest in improving these. EMC is not able to provide any systems at this time as they were developed in-house and are at their limits. While EMC is investigating implementing more robust systems, they will not be available until the end of the year at best. In the meantime, there are several good quality PRM (Partner Relationship Management) systems available, some as hosted solutions. These could be implemented in a matter of weeks and meet the majority of our current needs without extensive customization. Such a system would allow us to better manage, communicate with and analyze our partners.
Rashmi and I discussed the numerous separate partner programs and ideas to streamline the logistics behind them. We identified that the current VIP Reseller Network agreement could be modified to cover common issues with all partners (e.g. limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law, trademarks, confidential information, etc.) and separate addenda could be created that would cover the T&Cs specific to each type of business entity (e.g. Distributor, Solution Provider, Trainer, etc.). The Partner page on our web site currently has some of the different entities and we would continue to add new ones as appropriate (e.g. online resellers). A PRM system would allow us to manage the profiles for any type of partner and be the source data for automatically updating these on our web site. Each of these partners would be given password access to the partner portal and the available content would depend on their partner type, level and role (e.g. profile administrator, marketing, sales, technical, etc.)
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