One of the reasons I was keen to immerse myself at Lotusphere 2008 in Orlando last month, was a desire to talk to a saturation of Lotus/IBM business and channel partners. You see, in Asia Pacific more so than any other global geography, channel partners are the industry and their contribution to any strategy is critical to any vendor's regional success. CA's recent decision to move to a partner model in the APJ region highlighted that the role and value of a local analyst firm is closely wedded to the same business proposition that has made the ICT vendor channel market such a staggeringly large part of our industry. According to CA their realignment strategy was led by the need to increase market coverage and customer penetration by tapping local expertise. They go on to say that experience has shown CA that local industry expert partners possess a wealth of knowledge, experience and cultural understanding that no outside organisation could match.

In a previous life when I was responsible for the development of partnerships and alliances in a far-flung (from Stamford CT. anyway) corner of the globe, it became very clear that the greatest value offered by local arms of international analyst organisations was to assist US or European-based vendor sales & marketing objectives of equity growth, brand awareness, stability, penetration and strategic positioning within a selection of the regions top 100 accounts.

To be successful at that strategy you first need people on the ground, relationships in hand, and an implicit understanding of the economic psyche of the region. Those things could not be achieved with foreign-based resources or an over-the-phone analyst. The incorporation of organisations like our own are based on these geographic demands and so it seems is the vendor channel strategy. Helping manage the following list of inherent channel partner challenges becomes the role of the local analyst.

• Inability to penetrate all target accounts
• Perceived obsolesence due to competitive pressure from emerging products
• Incumbent price leader pressure and competitive noise
• Client migration and product/revenue cannibalisation
• Not being able to support clients in emergent technology migration
• Delivering greater product diversification within accounts (rather than just what they know)
• Selling low (and often technically)in prospective accounts

Therefore by reviewing their analyst purchasing strategy in alignment with the key objectives of their regional channel partner strategy technology vendors could increase analyst and channel partner ROI, increase end-user perception of the international vendors, and ultimately increase local industry development.

Quite simply, whether your view is that analyst firms are a same-same-but-different animal in the channel ecosystem or separate to it, vendors should not be investing millions of dollars in regional channel strategies without investment in the local analyst expertise to support it.