UGS Corp. of Plano, Tex., has launched a new global channel program designed to expand the presence of its product lifecycle management software and services to midsize companies in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

The announcement is intended to mark the launch of a more aggressive strategy into the EMEA midmarket, tapping into a market with significant potential, according to Angus Marshall, director of sales and channel programs EMEA for UGS.

The Global Channel Program is expected to increase its partner base by 50 percent by the end of 2006.

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Lifeboat Distribution of Shrewsbury, N.J., has agreed to market and distribute storage networking products from DataCore Software Corp. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Under the terms of the agreement, Lifeboat will resell all of DataCore's products that focus on the control, consolidation, virtualization and management of storage, including the SANsymphony and SANmelody disk server software products.

By partnering with DataCore, Lifeboat Distribution hopes to expand the virtualization range of SAN (storage area network) and iSCSI/LAN (Local Area Network) storage solutions and pass those solutions on to the resellers and systems integrators it works with, according to Dan Jamieson, a Lifeboat Distribution vice president.

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Wily Technology Inc., an enterprise application management vendor based in Brisbane, Calif., has expanded its global partner program by dividing its partners into three segments, each with its own program.

Business Partners are the first segment, and are further divided into Platinum business partners that can implement major products across multiple countries or continents, Gold business partners that have certified technical and sales staff, and Silver Business partners that have been trained in Wily's technologies.

Tech Partners also are divided into three areas—Technical Service Partners that have completed Wily's training and are approved to sell consulting services or perform custom application development based on Wily products; Technical Development Partners, ISVs or VARs that use Wily software to deliver solutions; and Technical Training Partners, which provide training on Wily application management products.

The last category is Industry Alliance Partners, generally global technology companies that embed, integrate with or recommend Wily products.

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Hewlett-Packard Co. of Palo Alto, Calif., has teamed with Cisco Systems to offer a series of services, many of which will help resellers better help their customers.

HP and Cisco now offer a single point of contact for online, pre-sales support for channel partners targeting the SMB (small and midsize business) market, via HP's Web based Smart Chat feature.

HP also has enhanced its Reseller Locator Tool to help customers locate resellers certified by both HP and Cisco, and offers the online Solutions Designer Tool that helps end-users plan the most appropriate network configuration while allowing them to contact a Cisco-certified reseller for a more comprehensive analysis of their environment.

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Network access control vendor InfoExpress of Mountain View, Calif., has introduced a new global partner program designed to capitalize on the growth of endpoint security.

The InfoExpress Channel Alliance Partner Program, open to security consulting firms, systems integrators, solution providers and implementation services companies, certifies partners to resell the company's CyberGatekeeper family of endpoint security solutions while receiving margins of more than 30 percent.

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