12 Important Facts About Channel, Vendor Partnerships

There's always room for improvement in the relationships between vendors and channel partners, and a new study looks at how strong those ties are. More than a third of the relationships partners have with vendors are considered strategic, but 60 percent said those strategic vendors contribute only 25 percent or less to their revenues, according to a survey of more than 150 channel partners conducted by Exëvo on behalf of channel automation specialist Relayware. That suggests that many of those strategic vendors are viewed as a necessary means to a larger end. In fact, the study finds that 60 percent of the channel partners surveyed have relationships with six to 30 vendor partners and 20 percent have relationships with 30 or more. Among the most strategic vendors are Cisco, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, but the numbers for each reached only 21, 12 and 10 percent, respectively. Most partners report they are relatively content with the quality of tools they get from vendors, but the number of systems they log in to is out of control. About half report their primary vendors require them to log in to four or more systems. The result is that channel partner employees don't log in nearly as much as vendors would probably like.