VTN News: Incentive Support Program

By Gennifer Biggs, security, storage, and managed services editor

Ryan Grant, director of channel marketing, Ingram Micro, took the stage today to explain a new program from Ingram that is geared at helping partners cut through the complexity of incentive and rebate programs from vendors. After piloting the program for six months, VTN partners can now take advantage of this incentive support program for a fee of $2,000. "We so often heard from partners that there were just many programs, too much to dig through," explains Grant. Especially frustrated, he says, were those IT businesses with multiple vendors on their line cards, each with program attached. Then, as each vendor changes its program every three or six months, it becomes nearly impossible to manage and find all the dollars available. "Our goal is to remove vendor program complexity, to show our partners more profit, more market share, and to help them develop deeper vendor relationships."

Ingram tackled this problem by piloting a program with HP - PartnerONE. The basic idea is that when you are involved with this incentive program, you notify Ingram of any opportunity you have involving HP, and your rep will help guide you to any incentives or rebates you may be looking at with any one deal. Plus, every 30 days, you will sit down and walk through where you are with that vendor. Do you need two more servers to win a five-figure rebate? Now you'll know.

The idea, explains Grant, it to look at your history with one particular vendor and find the path to the most incentives, something that is nearly impossible to do if you are a small IT firm because you just don't have the manpower or the data to see those patterns. While Ingram has formally launched the HP incentive partnership, it is in active negotiations with IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft to develop similar programs.

VTN partner Alan McDonald, a California VAR focused heavily in business continuity solutions for education and SMB customers, was among those in the pilot program. "We, as partners, get one central resource so we have one stop where we talk about our business with Ingram and HP," explains McDonald. "That central resource helps us strategize as we move forward by looking back at our history to see where we can adjust to earn more incentives. It pays for itself."