Last week, I had the chance to attend the viaVerio Partner Summit in Reston, Virginia, which started Sunday evening and ran until early Tuesday afternoon, after which attendees had the chance to tour the company’s nearby data center.
Normally I’ll attend an event with the explicit intent of covering it for the WHIR. But at this particular event, my primary function was to deliver a Tuesday morning keynote presentation. So I spent a lot of the time preoccupied with finishing up my presentation and putting together my PowerPoint deck.
I did try to attend as much of the event as possible, and I was actually pretty surprised to learn that some very big things are afoot at Verio – some things that might have even been a little bit underrepresented from a PR standpoint.
I was able to cover the announcement of the company’s “stimulus package” Monday morning, but aside from that, I was pretty occupied. Here are a couple of the big-deal things that came up during the conference.
Verio is moving to a 100 percent indirect model
This seemed to be one of the big talking points at the event, and understandably so. Verio has had a direct sales business for a long time. And it has balanced the direct model and its reseller channel for many years as well.
Since just about every attendee at the viaVerio Partner Summit was a reseller of Verio’s hosting services (that, after all, is the point of the viaVerio program), I think the news was pretty well received. Beyond the extra attention, the new focus means that Verio won’t be competing with its resellers.
Steve Renda, senior VP of sales and marketing at Verio announced the plan in the Monday morning keynote. He said it’s difficult for a company to effectively drive channel sales or direct sales when it has one foot in the boat and one on the dock. He gave himself a bit of wiggle room by projecting 90 percent channel sales by the end of 2009, but the long-term goal here is a Verio without a direct sales business.
A big part of that shift, of course, was re-purposing the company’s in-house sales staff. The result will be something Renda called VSTs (I think it stood for viaVerio Sales Teams), dedicated teams of five that will be available to support resellers in their sales efforts, or to handle them entirely.
Verio is working on a cloud hosting product for resellers
This one was a bit of a surprise to me. A part of the presentation I had prepared was telling resellers not to be shy with approaching Verio and letting the company know they wanted to know what Verio was working on as an answer to some of the threatening cloud computing products out there, especially since many of Verio’s resellers are in the commodity-type shared hosting business to one extent or another.
I’ll follow up on this some more in the future, because there wasn’t really much detail available at this point. But I can say for certain that Verio is working on something that addresses the cloud computing demand with an elastic, utility-priced hosting solution.
Verio is going global
I’ll have to do some follow-up on this one too. But the basic premise I took away here was that, while Verio has customers all over the world, it hasn’t necessarily pursued business the world over, up to this point. Part of the effort to reconfigure the sales focus of the business will include an effort to make the company’s services available around the world. Given the channel focus, that will have a lot of significance to resellers.
While I was excited to attend the event, I wasn’t necessarily expecting to walk away with quite as many specific questions about Verio’s business as I did. So expect to see a follow-up feature or two on Verio’s progress once I get a chance to talk to them some more.
As for the presentation, I think it went very well. I mentioned this in the news story we posted last week, but all of the feedback I’ve heard has been positive, though I don’t imagine people with negative feedback would have been so quick to seek me out. It was a lot of fun presenting, and an opportunity I really appreciated. But I’ll go into that more in a separate blog entry, and I’ll try to share some of the information from my presentation in a couple of subsequent posts.
For now, I’ll conclude here by saying I had a very interesting trip to Verio’s partner event, and I was very interested by the community that company has around its reseller products.
