Integration Alliance adds partners, unveils Business Builder

New program contributes to most satisfied HP customers purchasing through second-tier resellers

Leveraging its close contacts with Hewlett-Packard and HP 3000 resellers, Integration Alliance Corp. (IAC) announced new partnerships with two well-known MPE/iX suppliers and unveiled a program to build strong resellers. Meanwhile, Interex announced that the HP market's most satisfied customers get their sales information and make purchases through resellers such as those in IAC's alliance.

IAC used HP World to launch Business Builder, a process for developing resellers' business plans to set long-term and short-term direction. Business Builder's training and strategic planning are designed to help resellers handle the high level of growth in the booming HP channel.

IAC also announced it has new distribution agreements in place with Quest Software and Speedware Corp., makers of print distribution and Internet authoring software, respectively. The IAC announcements came on the heels of an Interex report that showed sales satisfaction was highest in the Americas HP market when a reseller was the customer's primary source of sales information.

Business Builder makes such resellers more capable of delivering such service, IAC officials said, by helping them meet growth challenges in an expanding industry.

"Business Builder enables us to build incremental revenue opportunities for our resellers," said IAC's CEO Bruce Smith. The IAC mission is to handle details on system procurement, configuration and financing, as well as create leads for its resellers and channel information to its Distribution Added Resellers (DARs) in useful formats. Business Builder helps modest-sized but growing DARs, such as those in the HP 3000 market, continue to manage growth opportunities that the IAC alliance delivers.

The program is important to HP 3000 customers as well as resellers because it provides management counsel to companies that can often make use of it: the HP 3000 solution suppliers whose expertise runs deeper in MPE/iX than in navigating the HP channel. While distributors are fond of offering marketing advice packages, the IAC program goes further, according to IAC's CFO Chris Joseph.

"Marketing and sales training is a good idea, but that kind of advice alone won't help manage growth opportunities," said Joseph. "Business Builder gives companies a working strategy for funding and managing growth." The process puts together a plan for both business and marketing management, creating metrics so IAC and resellers can work together to execute it successfully.

The Speedware agreement will put its Autobahn solution in the hands of a select network of IAC resellers, to be trained by Speedware and who can deliver close ties to the HP 3000 customer base. A similar arrangement sets up a network of Quest-capable resellers to handle Quest's Vista Plus and NBSpool software. IAC will pre-load demonstration versions of the Quest products on the HP 3000 servers it distributes through its Quest DARs and train the DARs in the Quest solutions.


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