Novell ditches direct sales incentive
Novell (NOVL) has dropped its last bonus scheme for its internal sales teams, making it effectively a 100 percent channel supplier.
The firm’s “sales force compensation plan”, which has been scaled down in recent years, has been retired and Novell sales people cannot meet quota by selling direct. “We have a solid commitment to the indirect route, there are no direct sales going on now,” explains Dan Veitkus, VP and GM of Channels and Alliances in EMEA for Novell. “It not just fulfilment, we are bringing our partners into every area of every account.”
Veitkus highlights its larger NHS clients, traditionally direct, who have now got at least two Gold Partners embedded within the account for all aspect of sales, service and support.
Problematic
Veitkus, who was drafted into EMEA in 2007 to sort out its problematic channel, has spent the last three years re-organising its programmes and distribution. “It was a bit crazy,” he comments on the 13 distributors the firm had in the UK when he arrived. Many had been added as the acquisition-hungry vendor had increased its product footprint, but had remained stagnant. “We cut a lot of dead wood...and we spend a lot of time and effort to ensure that the remaining partners had a strong economic reason for being with Novell,” says Veitkus.
The cull resulted in around a third of the 2000 plus EMEA partners leaving Novell, and distributors rationalised down to just five including Magirus, Bell Micro, Avnet and ECS Arrow. However, in the last 12 months, Novell has added a further 479 partners across the region as demand for its products has grown. “We have also added 2896 new customers and even with migrations, that is still strong growth,” he adds.
Investment
The firm has invest around $6m in channel programmes over the last year alone and deal registration has been strengthen to offer 20 percent margin protection. “We have also eliminated all fees for programmes – we would rather our partners invest that money in their businesses.”
On the technology side, Novell, which owns brands including SUSE Linux, Zenworks, GroupWise and Platespin is pitching it tent around the intelligent workload management concept. A new analyst-coined term that essentially means the middleware the firm has always been associated with but with further caveats around audit, control and policy. “We are the only vendor that has every part of the stack,” says Veitkus.
Veitkus is upbeat about the new messaging highlighting the heavily oversubscribed visitor levels to its recently resurrected Brainshare event in Amsterdam and between 10 to 20 percent growth ahead of the market in key areas like identity management, security and collaboration. “We are serious about the channel,” he adds, “We are recruiting new partners but now it’s around quality and not quantity.”
