NetApp Changes To Benefit Partners

partners, and is looking to implement technology from its Spinnaker acquisition to enhance its products.

Leonard Iventosch, vice president of channel sales, said NetApp is planning changes to its market development fund program this year, giving its two distributors, Arrow and Avnet, responsibility for administering it to their solution providers and to new solution providers that sign on with the vendor.

The company is also starting to implement a new rebate program based on meeting goals and stretched goals, and not just on revenue, Iventosch said.

Also new is an enhanced compensation-neutral sales policy so that, in most cases, NetApp sales reps who work with partners will actually see a slight gain in compensation compared with working a deal direct, he said.

The company also plans to change its deal registration program. The current program has been protecting deals that smaller solution providers register through Arrow and Avnet. But that protection is now being extended to large solution providers that work directly with the vendor.

On the technology front, NetApp is in the process of combining storage grid technology from its Spinnaker acquisition with its own OnTap operating system to build a scalable storage environment that manages data storage while reducing complexity from the IT and end-user point of view, said Chris Bennett, senior director of systems product marketing. Many of the moves to merge the two technologies will come in 2005, he said.

The implementation of Spinnaker technology at NetApp will make it easier to scale storage in a modular fashion as customers' data grows, said Merrill Likes, president of UpTime, an Edmond, Okla.-based solution provider.

Likes said he is glad NetApp is taking its time to implement the new technology. "When rolling out a new operating system, you don't want to do it willy-nilly," he said.