New ARCserve Backup Wakeup Call Program from CA

The vendor is offering an opportunity for resellers to significantly increase their margins on its flagship backup product.

By Cecilia Galvinalvin

Margins make a solution provider’s world go ’round, and CA is offering generous ones on its flagship ARCserve Backup product through a program the vendor prelaunched in January and February and officially rolled out this spring. Unlike some incentive programs that run for three to six months, however, the CA Backup Wakeup Call program will run for 15 months, through March 2010, with the aim of putting money in the pipeline for partners and, for CA, boosting deal registration numbers and adding roughly 1,000 partners in North America. Adam Famularo, senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Recovery Management and Data Modeling Business Unit, spoke with Executive Editor Cecilia Galvinalvin about changes to CA’s channel strategy and how the program works.

ChannelPro-SMB: Have you made changes to benefit partners in your year at the helm of the recovery management business unit?

Famularo: When I came over into this role, I brought some channel-based requirements into the organization. So now, for example, we have built consistent release cycles–every year we release a new build of our product. What that does for our channel partners is enable them to build an annuity-based business from our products. In February/March, for example, we did our last release; in April/May we did another release; and we will do our next release in April-May [2010]. Our partners know that at the beginning of every year when we have a new release they can go back to their customers to make sure they are on the latest release and can charge services and training dollars to teach them about the latest features and how to leverage them in their organization.

We’re also integrating more and more technology into that basic ARCserve product. We are adding data deduplication features, SRM reporting, and virtualization enhancements to do granular-level backup of virtual environments.

ChannelPro-SMB: What about the new program–how did that get started?

Famularo: We took a comprehensive look at our end-user base, our resellers, and distribution, and asked the same question: How do we create two to three times more value for them? We then tied those together into one program, answering the question a little differently for each of those constituents.

So for our end-user base we created the Xtra Value Pack. We bundled our ARCserve backup product with our XOsoft replication product–and we didn’t just bundle one copy of replication, but two–and added a copy of our ARCserve Dashboard product that lets an IT administrator get one view into CPU utilization, hard disk space being used by the servers, and so on. We bundled these three products together and are charging the same price that we would charge for a standard ARCserve backup product.

Then we looked at our resellers in two parts–the resellers’ sales reps and the resellers’ sales management or executive management team–and wanted to make sure they are two or three times more profitable selling CA.

For sales reps, if a customer is renewing software, instead of renewing the competition’s product, renew CA. And for doing that, we’re going to give the reseller’s sales rep an additional discount of 25 percent, which they get when they go to distribution to place the order. If they get a new product sale–say a customer calls up and says I’m looking for a backup technology and the rep positions and sells ARCserve-they get an additional 16 percent discount. And the 16 percent and the 25 percent are on top of the typical profit margins that they make today on our software, which is roughly 10 percent. So they can make 35 percent gross profit and 26 percent gross profit selling ARCserve.

This is, of course, tied to deal registration. What I didn’t want to do is offer this to everyone, which eats up my street margin–they’ll give that margin to the end user. So the way we’re keeping the value is by giving discounts to only the sales reps from partners that register and then close the deals. That way, partners are guaranteed significant discounts.

The next part of the equation is for the executive management team, as I mentioned earlier. Win or lose the deal, as long as your sales rep registered it and the deal closes, we will give management a 12 percent rebate on top of everything else. The management team can put it directly to the bottom line or give some to the sales rep–it’s up to them, and it all comes down to registering new deals.

Then, for distributors, we put together a fixed model where they know exactly how much rebate they are going to get. So instead of having to meet different parameters before getting dollar one, from dollar one distributors will get a fixed amount. This way, they can build programs around ARCserve and help some of the new resellers take advantage of the program.

[Editor’s note: For more information on the Backup Wakeup Call program, go to†http://ca.com/arcserve/partners/backupwakeup or call 1-800-TEAM VAR.]

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