ACOM Wants to Add 200 Resellers in Three Years

Published: April 14, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

You looking to make some money peddling solutions to your AS/400, iSeries, System i, and soon Power Systems customers? Then ACOM Solutions, the long-time maker of document management and content management software for the IBM midrange and Windows platform, wants to talk to you.

The Long Beach, California, company put a stake in the ground, saying that it wanted to add 40 new reseller partners before 2008 is done, and add a total of 200 in the next three years. ACOM, which was founded in 1983 and has over 4,000 customers worldwide, has had resellers since its inception, and it is not abolishing its existing reseller program, according to James Scott, the company's senior vice president who is in charge of is iSeries/System i Division. (Hey, ACOM still has one of those, unlike IBM!) The initiative that ACOM announced last week is the creation of an extended channel reseller partnership program, for which it has hired a partner relationship broker called Foster MacCallum International, which aids IT and communications equipment suppliers in creating their reseller partnership tactics and strategies.

Foster MacCallum boasts that IBM, SAP, and the formerly independent Hyperion (now part of Oracle) as its big clients, and it refers to itself as a "dating agency for the technology industry" that helps suppliers find value added resellers and visa versa. More importantly, the company keeps a global database of over 140,000 VARs.

"The new channels program follows a single-level model," explains Scott. "It is a high-value model that will entail a limited number of partner relationships while offering superior support and a broad selection of resources, including Web facilities and direct access to channel management and staff in our corporate office." (You can take a gander at the new partner site at www.acom.com/channels/program_overview_main.html.)

According to Scott, ACOM's existing partners will be able to keep their current relationships or join the new program, which will initially be available in the United States and Canada, followed up at some point in the future with other geographical regions. ACOM is keen on tracking down three different types of VARs: financial VARs, who sell financial applications and want to add document management and content management; System i and now Power Systems resellers, who are already knee-deep in applications and coping with document issues as a matter of day-to-day business; and VARs with expertise in document management, payment, and content management solutions who are looking to add a new channel partner.

ACOM currently has 20 partners listed on its Web site, so this effort with Foster MacCallum will represent an order of magnitude expansion in its reseller channel. This will, presumably, afford ACOM a much broader coverage of the i5/OS-i and Windows markets and boost its sales considerably. Exactly how much, time will tell.

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