Brocade offers extra perks to Foundry channel

Reseller's of Brocade's IP switches are being offered a series of inducements to encourage the sale of higher margin products to specific verticals.

Brocade channel partners are being offered a rebate for negotiating deals in specific market segments that the switch vendor wishes to pursue in Australia.

Channel partners that register a sale specifically into the categories of media and entertainment, health, education, Government or financial services will receive a thirty percent higher rebate than those that simply register a generic deal.

Charlie Foo, regional director of partner business for Brocade Asia Pacific said each of these verticals had unique solution needs.

"Media, health and data centres have high bandwidth, high compute power requirements, for example," he said, "whereas education needs a competitive solution on price - a different portfolio of products."

Foo said the targeted deals helps Brocade make better investment decisions around where its channel partners have a proven capability.

"It's about being selective in the markets where we fight, knowing where we are going to win," he said. "We align ourselves with sectors where we have an advantage over our competitors."

For the partner, he said, there is a greater "return on partnership".

"We want to ensure profitability to partners by not over-crowding a segment," he said. "We don't want to go to market with a scatter-gun approach - there are no margins in that. The plan is to be very focused."

Brocade's North American partners have also been offered a migration program to upgrade customers to 10Gb Ethernet networking products, again lured by higher rebates.

Foo said Australian Brocade partners are likely to hear more about this program shortly.

Taking the fight to Cisco, HP

Brocade has also announced that its Australian distributor, Distribution Central, is set to benefit from a new arrangement between Brocade and OEM partner Dell.

Dell announced in September 2009 that it would OEM a few models of Brocade switches, to counter Cisco's move into converged servers and switches and HP's acquisition of switch company, 3Com.

Graham Schultz, regional manager of Brocade Australia and New Zealand told CRN that whilst Dell will OEM a select portfolio of Brocade's products, the PC giant has also agreed to resell others and will be purchasing them through Distribution Central.

"Dell will be phasing in more Brocade products as the months roll on," Schultz said.

Schultz said Dell's OEM deal on Brocade's switches will prove telling as the market for enterprise compute hardware converges.

"We see it as a huge opportunity - Dell now offers the same end-to-end data centre play [as HP and IBM]," he said.