CharTec Academy: What's New In 2011
By Gennifer Biggs, security, storage, and managed services editor
As part of its June CharTec Academy, the HaaS vendor outlined new offerings it expects to roll out in the second half of the year. CEO Alex Rogers kicked off his series of announcements by talking about the newly expanded CharTec facility, which opened for the June academy with a training room almost three times as large as the former room. To make his point, Rogers pointed out that 100+ partners were in attendance. The room, which is outfitted with four large flat-screen televisions and full projection capabilities, is also set up to stream its presentations on the Web for those channel partners that can't make the investment to travel to CharTec headquarters for an academy.
Other changes that partners will see over the next few months include a new version of the CharTec backup and disaster recovery (BDR) product, and a new SoftBDR product that allows CharTec partners to layer software over other vendor's appliances to virtualize to the CharTec BDR data center. CharTec is also preparing to launch C4, a marketing solution for its partners that links marketing tracks in its partners' PSAs with the vendor's team of marketing experts to create a full-fledged advertising push for those partners. The solution will include outreach, telemarketing, and collateral for partners.
Lastly, Rogers, well known for his strong feelings about expecting your sales team to perform, has codified his process for hiring (and firing) sales team members. The 90-day plan starts with writing help wanted ads, continues through the interviewing and hiring process, and then ends with a 90-plan for onboarding and training sales team members with the goal of weeding the best out and jettisoning the rest. Rogers even promises to fire underperforming team members if partner owners just don't like that part of the process.