Westcon’s solutions programs, which include OneDefense, OneVoice, OneNetwork, ConvergencePoint and SecurityPoint, boast several thousand active registrants and experience over 7,000 page views per day.
Runa MacLeod, UK Marketing Director at Westcon Convergence, says Westcon will be using the new solutions programs to target the mid market in particular with their major brands of Nortel, Avaya and Samsung.
“Westcon is set to increase the focus we place on selling SMBs as well as develop sales of unified communications. We will be looking to increase and enhance a lot of the work that Crane Telecommunications carried out with new channel enablement activity, focussed classroom based training and workshops that target SMB business.”
With Nortel having just introduced a marketing collateral and campaign management service for their resellers MacLeod says that Westcon has developed their own marketing capabilities for use by their channel partners such as customisation of marketing campaigns and design support which compliment the activities of the vendor. To this end Westcon is launching the second phase of their ConvergencePoint.
“This takes the form of an enhanced program in terms of the infrastructure that allows us to do some of the social media and networking activities, such as blogging, pod casting and wikis, which will enable us to provide a real user experience to the site in terms of the tools and collateral each reseller is interested in. Blogs are a quick and informal way of informing resellers and keeping them up to date; RSS feeds will keep the news and postings immediate and personal to the user. We’ll want to know feedback whether it is good, indifferent or whatever will be building upon what we have today over the coming year.”
Macleod says that the ConvergencePoint web site will now have UK specific content and will be a platform for resellers to put together end to end solutions.
“We are now seeing the benefits of the coming together of Crane and Westcon; we have the voice skills to nurture the development of data resellers and vice versa and this is now producing tangible opportunities for our channel partners.”
The challenge in selling to SMBs is education; we have a lot of focus around SMBs with dedicated activities and teams and there will be an increased drive from Westcon over the coming year to secure more SMB business.”
Some of the enhancements that have been made to the programs include single sign-on. This feature enables customers to navigate seamlessly through any of Westcon Groups solution programs once signed on within any one program. Also, the new program infrastructure makes it easier to find and purchase solutions, while integrating social media capabilities that support blogging, message boards, wikis and other collaborative tools.
“Since the launch of our programs, we have made it substantially easier for resellers to do business with us as an organization while providing them with all the tools they need to succeed,” said Duncan Potter, chief marketing officer of Westcon Group. “The adoption and continued evolution of our tools and program infrastructure tell us that our approach is resonating with customers and vendors and most importantly, helping them identify and seize new opportunities.”