Two recent events and a client engagement have me thinking alot about PRM solutions and the challenge that technology vendors have in developing portals for their partners. Historically, PRM solutions have been about partner program automation - delivering an interface to help automate the management of partner contracts, levels and program benefits. Increasingly, PRM solutions are about partner opportunity management - managing lead distribution, deal registration and such. Many of the early PRM vendors, at least the ones that haven't gone out of business, struggle with this shift in focus. A couple, like BlueRoads, do this very well, but still, a major challenge remains for all of them and the vendor communities.

Barbara Darrow has a good post up today talking about the recent moves by Salesforce.com, Netsuite and others to woo partners to resell their software as a service (SaaS) offerings to their customers. Certainly, a margin program for partners who do the demand generation work of getting a customer to purchase a SaaS solution is warranted, but many of these sales don't contain the broad spectrum of revenue and profit opportunities for partners and the partner participation will be limited until this improves through the availability of integration API's, toolkits for customization and other service opportunities, which is an area that Microsoft has traditionally done well and would be well served to bring to the SaaS game, whenever they show up.

I was catching up on my blog reading in my old network of bloggers and saw a thread that is closer to what I am working on now. The discussion related to what vendors could expect from channel partners and, like the 6 blind men and the elephant, all the answers differed dramatically.

The root cause for this difference lay in the use of the term 'VAR' generically, without a good segmentation methodology. Not all VARs are created equal, so a way of organizing the market according to behavior, seems more appropriate. So, let's talk about the reseller behavior triangle and what it means to vendors.

I have a good friend from high school who played in a band with my brother and a couple of other friends that I still keep in contact with by email almost daily. Casey is a really talented guy and has a really talented wife and for years, they balanced having a professional life (he as a tech-writer and her as a teacher) with their alter-ego life as musicians trying to make a music career take off in the South Florida music scene.

Casey is a little north of 40 and Kris isn't far behind, although you wouldn't know it by looking at them - apparently the rock n roll lifestyle isn't as damaging to your health as reported. But after 20+ years of schlepping amps and equipment, dealing with surley bar owners and other ego-driven band members that came and went, anyone would get tired of the life, especially being up to 2am when you have to deal with kids at 7am the next day.

Faced with the dilemma Jethro Tull outlined - "too old to rock n' roll, too young to die" - Friendly Fire did something unexpected - they went virtual.

Dell is certainly very public about their desire to build out a world class partner program and to start working with their channel partners; to be clear, this isn't about them getting into the channel, but formalizing an existing relationship with partners that accounts for over $4b a year in sales for them. This is a high stakes move and they are getting some good folks to help out - IPED is helping do their research and design on their programs and they are partnering with CMP for their XChange events to get into the field with their partners.

The stumbling block for Dell to overcome, however, isn't a programmatic design challenge or even overcoming the current fears that partners have about Dell taking their customer information and going direct. The big challenge for Dell is a balancing act that I've never seen a company successfully pull off - balancing between being built to win deals at all costs versus the DNA of the company being built to have a win/win relationship with partners.