Motorola announces new channel-partner program
Motorola yesterday unveiled its PartnerEmpower program, which is designed to encourage the vendor giant’s partners to gain access to a larger number of customers without forcing them to expand their businesses to areas beyond their core competencies.
Under the program, all Motorola enterprise mobility solutions partners will be under a single channel-program framework, which is a key aspect of the company’s integration of its enterprise mobility business with its government and public safety business, which were combined last year. The integration also meant integrating sales forces, each of which had its own channel-partner programs, said Mark Kroh, vice president of North American channels for Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions.
With PartnerEmpower, Motorola hopes to create a “consistent experience” for channel partners throughout the organization, Kroh said. In addition, the program is designed to let partners leverage customer relationships to drive deals for Motorola outside of their typical areas of expertise.
“In the legacy Motorola government world, our channel partners are very good at understanding RF, two-way radio Astro P25, infrastructure and some broadband. But mobile computing and advanced data capture are very much greenfield opportunities in that space,” Kroh said. “Our strategy is to take our enterprise channel-partner organization that understand the portfolio and the application and bring them into the government space — or partner them with channel partners that have the relationships with the customers.”
This approach can help Motorola introduce enterprise-oriented technologies — such as those associated with the purchase of Symbol — into the government space. Similarly, two-way radio dealers can partner to gain access to enterprise customers of a mobile-computing partner.
“In terms of the partner ecosystem, Motorola has had it,” said Dino Farfante, president and CIO of American Barcode and RFID. “Now, they’re maximizing it.”
By adopting this program, Motorola hopes to encourage partners to focus more attention on becoming experts in their respective fields of specialization, rather than diverting valuable resources to pursue business outside their core competencies simply in an attempt to generate greater revenue.
PartnerEmpower will include three program tracks — wireless networks solutions, mobility and radio — that will be rolled out during the next 18 months. By leveraging a certification program and customer-satisfaction metric, Motorola hopes to make it easier for partners to team with other partners with complementary specializations to provide a more complete solution for customers, said Kathleen Curry, a vice president and senior director for Motorola North America channel sales.
“We talk a lot about ecosystems and partnering, but it actually isn’t not that easy,” Curry said. “You’ve got to have the right culture fit; you’ve got to have the right expectations up front; you have to know, as a partner, how you want to partner — are you interested in OEMing your software or is this a true resell environment? We’re helping our partners by putting these resources into a toolkit to help them identify what they need, so they can come to quicker decision whether [a potential partner] is a good fit.”
