CA to revamp channel program

CA Technologies will announce a new partner program and channel investment in Australia and the Asia Pacific region on Thursday.

The company's vice president for regional channel sales in Asia Pacific and Japan, Jim Fisher, told CRN that partners would be informed of the changes at an event on Wednesday evening US time in Las Vegas, where it is hosting CA World 2010.

The "big investment" in the partner program included new teams in a number of countries in the region, including Australia, whose sole responsibility it was to run the program, and the addition of salesforce.com software into the management system provided to partners.

"It's one thing to have a partner program - you also have to execute it," Fisher said.

"We've always done well at that in Australia but not as well in some of the non-English speaking countries in the region. We haven't had that maniacal focus on [execution]. That's what we're putting in place."

Although all business in Asia went through the channel, CA Australia still booked 60 percent of its business directly with customers.

The remaining 40 percent was channel-focused - consisting of leads shared with or brought in by partners, as well as the vendor's growing managed service provider (MSP) presence.

"We're having a lot of success in the MSP space... with our traditional products," Fisher said.

Newer technologies acquired through the recent purchases of 3Tera, Oblicore, Nimsoft and NetQoS  also provided significant growth engines for the company and for partners in the region.

"These are fantastic technologies but they were typically American-based," Fisher said.

"There's great opportunity for CA to put its sales force onto this newer technology."

Fisher believed Nimsoft - which makes cloud system monitoring software - presented an "equal if not bigger" opportunity for growth in Australia compared to CA's traditional portfolio.

"Nimsoft is going to be very successful in Australia," Fisher predicted. "I think its going to be big for us in Australia this year."

Nimsoft already had a small presence in Australia prior to its acquisition by CA.

"We're still trying to get our heads around what they had," Fisher said. "We'll look to leverage off their existing partners [of course]. But how much they were doing direct or leveraging their channel for, we still need to find out."

Depending on their skills and size, Nimsoft partners could be recruited to offer a wider portfolio of CA products. Likewise, CA's traditional partners were going to be trained on the new cloud portfolio shortly.