Input At the Outset

It was never part of the plan, even when founders Phil Soran, Larry Aszmann and John Guider started the company last year. The trio gained a solid reputation within the storage-technology community as the founders of Eden Prairie, Minn.-based XIOtech, which they sold to Seagate Technologies in 2000 for $360 million. Compellent, which reportedly is creating a data-recovery tool for midmarket businesses, was the only Minnesota technology start-up to receive venture funding in 2002. That generated a strong buzz among solution providers, as the company again set up shop in Eden Prairie.

"People were curious about what we were doing and wanted to get involved early," Soran recounts. "Our first reaction was, 'Well, we don't want to tell you, because we are too far away from a product.' But after getting a lot of calls from resellers and end users, we started to think we needed to take advantage of this and be opportunistic."

Compellent executives are still tight-lipped about the specifics of what they are developing, but that didn't stop them from creating the Compellent Customer Council (also known as C3). Quite simply, a handful of VARs were contacted and encouraged to round up some of their customers. Together, they were brought in for hours-long sessions where they were asked for all kinds of feedback. Attendance bloomed, and in a three-month period, nine C3 meetings were held, in which customers were asked everything from their pain points to what features should be included in the product's initial release. They also have input in developing the company's partner programs.

For example, Compellent met with one VAR partner, where they discussed building some additional infrastructure and service products that would layer on top of Compellent's technology infrastructure. Now that offering is available to all partners and VARs who sign up.

"This has been very refreshing," says John Dusek, president of Apple Valley, Minn.-based VAR Conver-gent Solutions Group. "Most companies, by the time they come out to the partners and resellers, have already made all the programs and made all the plans. Then they say, 'This is the way you are going to take it. Good luck.'"

Executives at Compellent, which plans to generate 100 percent of its revenue through the channel, point to a number of advantages partners gain from this sneak preview of the company.

"They are getting exposure to the product alongside their customers," Soran says. "Guess what they are able to do then? They are able to start in advance building services and support offerings that are appropriate for this product set. What happens is it preloads their service development, it preloads their customer base, and it preloads their revenue."

What Goes Around Comes Around
No doubt, there is always room to improve the way VARs interact with vendors and suppliers, says Gary Orenstein, vice president of marketing at Compellent. One way is to fine-tune specific product requirements; another is to fine-tune product offerings in such a way that they can lead to services offerings for VARs. If solution providers want to increase their services offerings, they will need an underlying set of features that tie into that.

"So what we were able to do is not just make adjustments to the technology road map, but make adjustments to our business-interaction road map so it could serve the channel," Orenstein says. "Both end users and resellers have a lot of input in formulating the product. It really gives them a sense of ownership. And the resellers are getting a chance, early on in the process, of building a customer-base in advance of signing up for a new offering."

All of this work seems to have generated some goodwill among customers, as well. Michael Roller, an IT manager at Minneapolis law firm Fabyanske, Westra & Hart, has attended at least two C3 sessions and was impressed to find out that a suggestion he made during the first meeting was taken seriously enough to be implemented into the product by the second session.

"I never had anybody ask [before]," he says. "I'm not big enough for people to ask me. They ask a huge player."

And the product has turned out to be more than just vaporware. "This really does look like an exciting product," Roller says. "And these people know my size and know my market."