Novell completes channel “transformation”

Novell has revealed a radical shake up of its channel organisation in an effort towards making a more partner-centric business model.

“Novell is placing more and more emphasis on our partners as our route to market. They are fundamental to the company’s future and reinvention,” Jill Henry, Novell’s UK and Ireland partner director, told Channel Pro.

“When you are an infrastructure vendor of our size you have to mitigate the risk of a mixed source environment for your customers. That means that a company of Novell’s size has to partner. We have to partner with the big hardware vendors, the big software vendors and we have to have an ecosystem of implementation partners. Partnering for us is a must have; it is not an optional sales strategy.”
Partner Programme
This month Novell announced a complete overhaul of its partner programme, which Henry describes as “the final piece of the jigsaw.” The new programme includes key changes to its margin and rebates structure, MDF and a new deal registration rewards programme. It will see Novell offering a flattened discount for its entire channel, with its top tier Gold and Platinum partners rewarded with rebates on top of the discount as part of the new deal registration scheme.

“We have dabbled with deal registration and rebate schemes before, but they’ve been quite localised in their approach and their design,” explains Henry. “This is a global deal registration programme we’re rolling out. We’ve invested in a new software package called Blueroads, which is going to make deal registration all automated for partners.
“It is a bold move for Novell to put more margin into the channel, rather than taking it away. It underlines how serious we are about the channel.”

Novell’s Marketing Development Fund (MDF) is also open to Gold and Platinum partners: “We have launched a partner marketing programme, Partner Accelerators, which is a granular and menu driven programme,” explains Henry. “Last year we found that if we were very prescriptive around what we offered the channel partners there was not a great uptake. We’ve broken our marketing programme down in a very granular way so partners can pick off a menu of services to form their own marketing programmes.

“We have a 70/30 model as well, so Novell funds up to 70 per cent of the programme, so they can have a far reaching and powerful programme with little incremental outlay to their business.”
Groundbreaking
Henry describes the changes as “groundbreaking for Novell.” She explains: “Most solution providers have been service providers around Novell technology, now we’re asking them to go out and sell on our behalf, and we will reward them accordingly,” she says.

Henry, who came into the organisation 18 months ago to look after the UK and Irish partner business, uses words like ‘transformation’ and ‘reinvention’ to illustrate the open source software vendor’s plans. She acknowledges the journey has been a long one: “We’ve been on road of partner transformation for over two years now...We are turning all areas of our business, whether it’s support, consultancy, marketing or sales, towards to the channel as the primary route to market. Obviously you don’t do that in a twelve month period, this is really the second year of the execution plan around the channel transformation that we set out to achieve at the end of 2007.”

She says this continued in 2008 by putting extra resources into technical and sales enablement on a bigger scale than ever before. Novell also slimmed down its own consultancy organisation in the UK and Ireland, comprising more than 25 people. “In a downturn partners rely on delivering consulting services profitably in order to maintain their own business model. We slimmed that organisation down to seven people. We enabled our current and new partners to take on a lot of those consultancy services on our behalf.”
New channel faces
The firm has also made a series of key appointments, such as Dan Veitkus to the role of VP, Partners for EMEA, and Javier Colado to president, Novell EMEA, with overall responsibility for sales and business operations in the region.
Javier Colado will assume responsibility for the partner organisation upon his return from the US in April, where he is currently putting the finishing touches on Novell’s global channel programme. In the meantime, John Dragoon, who heads up the firm’s marketing organisation, will oversee the new programme.

“We’re thrilled in Europe,” says Henry. “Javier is well loved and respected in Novell as a leader in EMEA. He’s been doing his partner job for the last six to nine months; he will come back with a lot of content that will be very useful to us in continuing channel transformation at Novell.”
Henry also says Novell will recruit more channel partners this year, with a target of 20 new “high touch, high value relationships” that will move the business forward.
“We’ll be fairly discerning how many partners we work with and how we recruit to our partner programme, and we expect the partner to be fairly discerning as to whether or not they join. We will probably be recruiting one or two new channel partners a month at max.”