CA shakes up channel strategy again 27 August, 2006 By Chris Talbot

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"What's happened is CA has recognized for awhile that it needs to develop its partner business," said Gary Quinn, executive vice president of indirect business at CA, who had been working on CA's growing consumer business before returning to lead CA's indirect business.

When the company merged its indirect and direct business organization about two years, the idea was to leverage all of its sales forces, but Quinn said it might have been a bit early for the company to do that. So CA is switching back to the old way of doing things. The company has separated its indirect and direct sales organizations, and put all indirect business under a single worldwide organization to drive it to a greater maturity level, he said.

"On the distributed side of the house, 20 per cent of our business comes through partners today," Quinn said.

The reorganization of sales means that CA will be focusing on products and programs for its channel partners to get where it wants to be, he said. All of the traditional channel business has once again been put under the leadership of George Kafkarkou, senior vice president of SMB and consumer channels. Kafkarkou spent two years working with Quinn to build CA's consumer business.

"We've placed a focus on distribution partners with a leader, the traditional large account reseller with a leader, and we've reintroduced the premier field-based partner community," Quinn continued.

He added, "We've added more structure to it. We've added more people to it."

According to Quinn, CA is also putting more emphasis on geography with its restructuring. There have been some issues in the past where partners in one city were dealing with customers in another city where they had no actual presence. This meant a lot of travel time for them.

"I want people to live next to the partner. I don't want them to fly in every week for two or three hours. I want them to get up every day and be in that community with the partner," Quinn said. However, it's not meant to restrict partners in their businesses, he said.

On the enterprise side of CA's business, the company has been increasing the number of resellers it deals with, but Quinn said the increase is at a pace that allows CA to support all partners.

"I can 't double my partner base before I'm able to do it," he said.

On the commercial side of the business, things are a bit different.

"In the commercial side, we have lacked a bit over the last 18 months in channel marketing -- both marketing for the products, as well as marketing and communicating to the partners themselves," Quinn said. At least partially because of that, CA has seen a reduction in its affiliate partner base.

To grow the commercial partner base again, CA has built a separate channel marketing organization back into place. The organization is responsible for communicating with partners to let them know what's going on with CA and its products.

"We believe by doing that, we will be able to grow our partner breadth because people will realize we're in that business and we've just stopped communicating over the last 18 months," he said.

In order to make it easier to do business with CA, the company is also listening to its partners. One of the biggest complaints partners have, Quinn said, is that CA has far too many SKUs -- enough to make ordering products a complicated task. At the moment, CA has 14,000 active SKUs and another 40,000 inactive SKUs. The inactive SKUs represent products that are no longer the current releases, but Quinn said resellers still order them for their customers. Often enough, the inactive SKUs are ordered for existing installations of those products.

"When you actually visibly look at it, either the systems they're using or the price books they have with those partner numbers in it, it's very hard to find the products, very hard to configure them," Quinn said.

Quinn said his goal is to drastically reduce the number of SKUs. By the release of the October price list, his goal is to have fewer than 10,000 active SKUs. By January, it's possible the price list could have fewer than 2,000 SKUs, but Quinn said how much reduction there is will depend on what needs to be done.

"If I can show up with a price book that's a quarter of the size it is today, I think people would be jumping up and down out there," Quinn said.