Monday Morning Impact – April 6

By Ken Presti, Senior Consultant, Channel Impact

AT&T Partner Exchange Introduces New Features

AT&T Partner Exchange is introducing new program enhancements designed to help accelerate solution providers’ business evolution and increase their success in the marketplace.

The simplified two-tier structure will include Platinum and Platinum Elite levels that scale upwards with volume, enabling access to enhanced pricing and benefits, such as additional Market Development Funds.

Investment Development Funds will soon be available for solution providers who invest in activities beyond marketing, including sales and operational consulting, contracting support, API development and systems enhancements to platforms like billing and service assurance. Funding will be available through an easy-to-access portal where solution providers can select from a list of third-party vendors ready to help meet their internal business transformation objectives.

The Certification Achievement Program helps solution providers build in-depth knowledge of specific product and service offerings in three technology tracks: Network, Cloud/Hosting and Mobility.

The innovation ecosystem brings in third parties to help solution providers evolve using value-added services. This includes Billing-as-a-Service (BaaS). With BaaS, solution providers can access tools from BluLogix, Omniware, OneBill and Profitec to ease the billing process.

Channel Impact
Helping partners to add value is the common denominator of all of the announced enhancements. We’re seeing carriers take this aspect far more seriously than they did in years past, following the model originally set by various infrastructure and software vendors.

Deloitte and Verizon Team up on Cyber Incident Response

Deloitte and Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced a strategic alliance to deliver a comprehensive set of security and risk-management solutions to help businesses prepare, respond and recover more efficiently, effectively, and thoroughly when a cyberattack occurs.

The Deloitte/Verizon alliance will leverage Verizon’s global computer forensics, incident response, and investigation services in conjunction with Deloitte’s cyber risk advisory services focused on governance, strategy, business operations, compliance, and remediation.

“As the cybersecurity landscape becomes more formidable, this alliance enables enterprises to better prepare for today’s new reality,” said Mike Denning, vice president, global security for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “We understand that companies need to have the mindset that being breached is a matter of when, not if. With our combined capabilities, we are preparing enterprises to better withstand a cyberattack before and beyond the breach.”

According to Verizon’s “Data Breach Investigations Report” series, the time to compromise usually takes days or less, while the time to detect a breach is often much longer. This can lead to widespread and potentially harmful data loss, brand reputation damage and lost customer trust, making cybersecurity a key imperative for organizations of all size across all industries.

Channel Impact
Effective security has evolved into nothing less than a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole. Bringing together two very complementary components is a solid move for both of these companies.

Avnet Launches New Portal to Help Track Service Renewals

Avnet Technology Solutions has announced the kickoff of uRenew, a new tool designed to help U.S. and Canadian solution providers track the status and renewals of customer service contracts.

“Services are typically the most profitable component within any solution, and even the slightest increase in services sales can have a dramatic impact on our partners’ businesses,” said Larry Fulop, vice president and general manager, supplier services, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “We created uRenew to maximize partners’ profitability and streamline the service renewal management process for customer environments with hardware and software solutions from multiple manufacturers.”

Features include a centralized database for service contracts, support for forecasting and transaction status updates, and insight to identify upsell and cross sell opportunities, as well as create initial budgeting and pricing information.

Avnet uRenew has been successfully piloted with select partners for the past 60 days, offering them initial insight into their Cisco, HP, IBM and Oracle service contracts.

Channel Impact
Effective tracking of service contract renewals has long been the Achilles heel of the channel. The move towards cloud, managed services and SaaS makes this function more important than ever. Therefore, anything that distributors can do to make the process more effective and efficient will be viewed positively by the partners.