Sprint Puts Mobility on the Midway

The three-day Sprint Business Solutions Partner Meeting in Chicago in November was a showcase for the companys wireless services. Against that backdrop of a carnival theme, the midway was all-mobility with 34 vendor partners hawking their wares alongside the tarot card readers and ring-toss games.

Steve Rowley, vice president of partner sales for Sprint, joked in his opening remarks that according to the fortune tellers, not selling Sprint would be bad for your love life.

Kidding aside, Rowley was all business when taking about the opportunities for dealers in wireless. For our partners, wireless is huge, he told PHONE+. He noted that wireless has become a core infrastructure purchase for businesses and dealers can find revenue-generating opportunities in facilitating centralized ordering, lifecycle management and applications/solutions.

It was such an overwhelmingly wireless-focused event that Sprint executives like Rowley and Tim Donahue, vice president of marketing, made a point to say they werent forgetting about the wireline business.

Rowley said it was a banner year for the channel selling wireline services. In November, they had reached 108 percent of target, driven in large part by MPLS and IP services.

About 300 people attended the event, which is about double last years turnout, insiders said, noting an increased commitment from the carrier to get its regional channel managers and their agents to the rally.

Taking a look at 2007, theres a host of things we are working on, said Rowley. One of the things that we will continue to do is get more visibility for this channel within Sprint Nextel and more streamlined with our other channels and cohesive compensation for teaming. We are aggressively looking at those plans.

Theres still conflict between channels. Thats job one for [Rowley] and I, added Mark Krantz, vice president of channels. He said new teaming policy will help dealers and direct sales people not bump heads and take more ground to deliver solutions.

I really feel we are going to nail that in 2007, Rowley said.

For more photos of the event, check out the Channel Surfing blog at www.phoneplusmag.com/blogs/khali.