Follow SonicWALL To A Professional Internet Industry

Service Providers rely on partners, and as internet partnerships become more complex, vendors and resellers are working together. We talked to a vendor about their award winning partnership program in an attempt to understand what the ideal relationship would be.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 12, 2005]

Inspired by the ISPs we talk to, such as John McKown (see How to Grow, How to Change) and by Jon Price, who runs ISPCON (see GROW UP), ISP-Planet, the journal for independent ISPs, is advocating that ISPs change their business models.

There's money to be made in business services (see Editorial: ISPs Can Survive). There's no money, or little, in residential services (see Triennial Review Part I: A Definition of Competition, and CLECs See No Future in Residential Service and AOL, Feeble Giant).

So ISPs need to provide business services and at ISPCON we started asking questions about what an ISP would need to do to be more like a VAR (see John McKown, above). One answer we found in one of the free magazines you get at such events.

VAR Business magazine had just published the issue containing its annual report card for 2005, in which it rated the quality of partnership programs at key technology vendors. The magazine gave an award to a company ISPs know well: Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security appliance vendor SonicWALL.

What fascinated us is that VARs have a professional, consultative relationship with their vendors. We did talk to individual ISPs at ISPCON who have regular conversations with, say, their anti-spam vendor, but as far as we know, no vendor is advised by an "ISP Council" but many do have a "VAR Council" providing feedback and requests for new features.

Of course, some ISPs go open source to write features or influence projects, but the ISP industry could in the future influence internet technology. ISPs have the knowledge and the expertise, and that should be enough to obtain a voice at the technology table.

Call your vendor
So we call up SonicWALL and they put us in touch with a key SonicWALL VAR, Wall, South Dakota-based Golden West. Golden West is a rural ILEC with a history dating back to 1916. The company now serves 38,000 telephone customers, 15,000 Internet subscribers, 3,000 cable television viewers, 3,000 paging customers, and about 225 call center customers.

Roy Martindale, product manager at Golden West, explains in further detail. "We have 135 megabits of connectivity to the internet. We have three T-3s to disparate carriers. We're owned by a telco that already had a 24 x 7 contact center and data center. We can get cabinet space with redundant power and fiber loops. We can provide customer service support to dealers and to end users. They get unique 800 numbers and we answer the phone in their name. We're also serving 65 ISPs around the country."

The call center is generally staffed by engineering students from the local South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, who are knowledgeable without being expensive.

It's the service, not the technology
As we make this line of inquiry the key theme of ISP-Planet for the near future, we're hearing the same thing over and over again. Martindale tells us, "it's about the service, not the product. The irony of this conversation is that the answer cannot be hardware. We all know where that leads."

Pete Brant, director of channel sales for SonicWALL, says that the company knows it needs to work with key partners like Martindale to continually enhance and develop its product roadmap. One internal process for driving these products and features is referred to within SonicWALL as CLIC (where CLIC stands for Customer Links Innovation and Commercialization). Brant and all customer-facing employees are expected to submit a number of these requests and enhancements effectively aligning SonicWALL’s development roadmap with its partners and customers.

For example, when SonicWALL released its GMS (Global Management System) product four years ago, Golden West's feedback was that the product was wonderful but the focus needed to be for a partner to deliver critical value-added managed services not just an end-user management platform.

VAR meet ISP, ISP meet VAR
While ISPs are trying to acquire VAR skills, VARs are becoming more interested in software as a service and in selling data pipes to customers. "While ISPs are looking to fulfill other business needs, for other pieces of the solution to sell, the same thing is going on in the VAR community," Brant says. "Unless you are an integral part of your customer's network, you're a cost. You're not providing value."

Martindale agrees. "We have direct customers in the South Dakota and North Dakota regions, and beyond that, we sell through dealers all across the country. We can brand our service as their service."

— End