Arrow ties deal registration programs into one portal 17 June, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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The SolutionRegistration portal will feature five suppliers under the Alt Tech Group when it goes live on July 6, but Arrow's plan is to continue to expand the participating vendors within the group and then eventually to vendors throughout Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions, said Bill Botti, president and COO of Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions' Alternative Technology Group.

The distributor serves as a good aggregation point for deal registration programs, which Arrow has all tied into its own portal. Between 70 and 80 per cent of the information being entered into an online deal registration form are common to all forms, and the information doesn't change much.

"So why not build a site that allows them to key that once and then select individual vendors and send it off to vendors as if it had been keyed in by the VAR in the individual portals?" Botti said.

Reseller sales reps can use the portal to see all of their individual deals, while their managers can get details on all their reps' deals. Vendors can get information on deals their resellers are registering while also being able to get some general statistics on other vendors their products are being paired with in registered deals.

"The driving factor behind this is if we make it easy for the reseller to register deals, he'll register more and get more margin and rebate, which improves his bottom line," Botti said. Vendors also get a higher number of deals being registered.

Additionally, when multiple vendors that tie in their deals for additional margin are entered, the system can automatically compute it. For instance, McAfee deals get an extra six points when the deal includes VMware products, Botti said. The system will recognize this.

The SolutionRegistration portal was developed (and is hosted by) Amazon Consulting. Using APIs, the portal can be tied into vendors' deal registration portals, which Botti said makes it easy to pull all of the programs together into one place.

The portal was designed to reduce the complexity of deal registration for resellers. They can use one deal registration portal to register all of their deals instead of spending a lot of time bouncing between multiple deal registration portals to get all details added. It saves them time, which they can then use to do what they really need to do -- get out there and sell, Botti said.

Launching with five suppliers (including VMware, Fortinet, Lakeside Software and McAfee), Arrow ECS's Alt Tech Group will shortly begin approaching other suppliers to get on board with the new deal registration portal.

"It'll be an aggressive campaign through the balance of the year to get more people up," Botti said.