Motorola Rounds Out Partner Program With Radio, Mobile Tracks

Between wireless LAN archirecture announcements and new smartphone debuts, it's been a busy week so far for Motorola. And the company isn't ignoring its solution provider partners, either. Motorola on Wednesday debuted two new tracks in its PartnerEmpower channel program, focused on its radio and mobile solutions business.

The new tracks, officially called Radio Solutions and Mobile Solutions, cover partners who sell Motorola's two-way radio, RFID, mobile computer, bar code scanning and other product sets, including the legacy Symbol business.

Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions (EMS) debuted PartnerEmpower in March. It's a full overhaul of Motorola's channel program -- set to be phased in over an 18-month period -- that now awards solution providers points based on their success in metrics like volume sales, customer satisfaction and vertical market expertise. It then assigns them to program tiers -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum -- with commensurate margin rewards, based on those points.

In April came the first of the three main tracks, focused on wireless network solutions.

"We have three very diverse partner communities, and we're creating a framework whereby they can expand their footprint with Motorola," said Mike deVente, vice president, North America channels, mobile solutions. "A lot of partners miss engagement opportunities and we're finding that a partner can extract a lot more profitability if they're in a program that works around where their commitments are."

Next: Incentives For Partner Growth

DeVente said the appeal of PartnerEmpower is that it recognizes partners for their strengths, and encourages them to sell more of the Motorola portfolio once they realize better rewards for more competencies.

"Without being too cocky, I think we're the undisputed national champion in serving these markets," he said. "We have purpose-built products, and they're in the markets a lot of these partners have built their businesses on, and are part of the vernacular they use every day. What we need to do is make sure there's as compelling a business opportunity as possible."

In addition to the program updates, Motorola has been busy on the technology debut front, too. Earlier this week it introduced WiNG 5, a new architecture for its 802.11n wireless product that according to Motorola provides higher quality-of-experience for mobile voice, video and data services through better distribution of service to the edge and greater area coverage per access point. The technology is already available on Motorola's RFS 4000 wireless services controller and its AP 650, and is headed for RFS 6000 and RFS 7000 controllers and 6511, 7131 and 7181 access point models in the first quarter of 2011.

Motorola also this week introduced the Droid Pro, a business-geared version of its popular Droid line of Android-based consumer smartphones, and is intended as a challenger to BlackBerry. The Droid Pro includes a QWERTY keyboard, a 1-Ghz processor, Adobe Flash Player 10 and sync-ing abilities for corporate e-mail, contacts and calendar.

According to Motorola, "It's an Android for business with full-push corporate e-mail with corporate-level security, unified calendar and additional work features."