The channel is familiar with deal registration programs from many vendors in the market place. Today, Arrow Electronics Inc. (NYSE: ARW) of Engelwood, Colo., announced details on its Solution Registration program that is intended to help resellers register deals involving products from many vendors on one deal registration portal.
The new program and portal site was launched by Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions business unit and includes special-pricing to encourage both resellers and vendors to give the new multi-vendor deal registration program a try.
Currently, VMware, Fortinet, Lakeside Software, McAfee and one other vendor who wished not to be named have signed on to the program.
Bill Botti, president and COO of the Alternative Technology Group of Arrow ECS, said an additional three vendors will be added before Solution Registration launches on July 6th. The goal of the program is to have all 35 of Arrow ECS’s vendor partners on board in a year’s time.
“VARs today have to register transactions for multi-vendor deals on each different site that has many looks and feels just to get additional margin and rebates. As a distributor we believe we can be the perfect aggregation point for registered transactions so we built a portal with a common look and feel,” Botti said.
The Solutions Registration portal will encompass all the necessary fields of information that would be required on any vendor deal registration site. The Arrow portal will also have independent tabs for the different sections and suppliers. “If one VAR is registered with McAfee, but not VMware than the VMware tabs does not appear,” he said.
The portal also manages all the rebates, skus and price lists from the vendors who are participating.
According to Botti, the advantage of this system is that a reseller just has to fill in one form. When the form is submitted to Solutions Registration all the participating vendor deal registration programs get updated automatically.
“The VAR gets to save more time and time is dollars in the sales business,” Botti said. He believes the Solution Registration system will lead to more deals being registered and therefore more transactions.
For the vendor, this portal will give them insight into the sales that are being registered helping them figure out what products are complementary to their own.
“The vendors get a bigger more accurate pipeline and more visibility into the reseller and what they are selling besides their own products. So VMware can see how often Fortinet is used with their solutions,” he added.
For Arrow, Botti said this system enables the distributor to be more proactive with the vendors and the resellers “to help move these deals along.”
Arrow, the vendor participants and the resellers each have their own login and can access sales charts and produce PDFs or Excel files to better inform each party on deals in the pipeline, margins and rebates.
Arrow ECS will be working with other suppliers of the Alternative Technology Group – as well as those represented by its North American HP, IBM, MOCA/Sun Microsystems and Storage Groups – to bring deal registrations for additional lines to the portal in the coming months.
