New CA Partner Program Targets Midmarket

CA is rolling out a new Partner Enablement Program offering improved support, better response times, sales help, and access to training and documentation for CAs most productive midmarket resellers.

The program, announced Sept. 18, is among the first fruits of the Islandia, N.Y., vendors 5-month-old Mid-Market Business Unit and is focused largely on partners who sell and support CAs BrightStor ARCServe and XOSoft recovery management solutions.

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Under the program, CA is promising its top-tier recovery management VARs direct access to "CA Solution Architects, the CA Partner Technology Center, CA Advanced Technical Support, CA R&D and the Software and Advanced Technical team to ensure proactive problem prevention and timely resolution to support issues," according to the company.

"This program is about simplifying the way partners do business with CA," said Doug Engledow, vice president of partner enablement at CA. "Its our responsibility to our partners to ensure that our software is simple and easy to operate and that our dedicated support and services result in faster resolution of problems and more sales."

Lawrence Martin, vice president of development for CAs midmarket and storage business unit, said the centerpiece of the new partner program is its enhanced tech support. Resellers are assured of 24-hour response and access to an 800-number. Each qualifying partner will be given a PIN code that will populate the fields in pending trouble tickets to speed resolution and minimize the need to repeat information. In addition, issues in the support queue can be handled by CA technical representatives and members of the development team, "so you wont see things getting hung up in there for long periods of time," Martin said.

In addition to the remote services, participants in the program can get on-site help from experienced CA personnel, who will work directly with end users for pre-sales, complex setups, upgrades and problem resolution.

"We can go in and work on behalf of the partner, or we can work together with the partner," Martin said. "The important thing is that we are making this as flexible as possible and always making sure that its the partner that maintains ownership of the relationship with the end user."

The partner program also comes with access to CAs Partner Technology Center library, with its wealth of documentation, white papers, collateral and on-demand demos that can be customized to demonstrate particular end-user applications, officials said.

To qualify for the program, resellers must either have done $500,000 in sales of CA recovery management products in the past year or agree to sell on an increasing scale ($25,000 for the first quarter, $50,000 for the second quarter and $75,000 for the third quarter) to a total of $300,000 in the coming year. Qualifying VARs must also employ full-time technical representatives trained in CA recovery management, and the reseller must focus on the midmarket, which CA defines as between 500 and 5,000 employees with annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion. Partners must also agree to host one event per year to promote and sell CA products.

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