Coronavirus: Fujitsu adds to list of vendors increasing support for partners

Throughout the Covid-19 coronavirus crisis, vendors have shown a willingness to stand by partners and provide support through these challenging times.

There have been flexible payment terms, early access to market development funds (MDF) and, for those with finance arms, some offers to keep customer spending flowing.

Fujitsu is the latest to outline how it is helping its Select partners through the pandemic, with a range of measures designed to ease the pressure.

The vendor is providing flexible payment options and deferred instalments for customers of partners. Fujitsu has also introduced a flat-rate incentive programme and relaxed its compensation models.

Fujitsu Financial Services has put together a set of offerings targeted at customers to make sure partners can keep them investing in IT. These include the deferred payment terms, stepped monthly or quarterly payments that can increase when customer liquidity improves, and sale and leaseback programmes.

The vendor is also pointing resellers in the direction of its uScale offering, which gives customers the chance to get immediate access to servers and storage on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Customers can take advantage of uScale without the need for any upfront investment, and the costs can be easily flexed up and down depending on usage. It should appeal to those users that want to make sure they are prepared for when the lockdown eases.

“Fujitsu is very aware of the exceptional pressure that channel partners are under from the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, Fujitsu has put together a range of flexible stimulus packages to support Select channel partners and their customers during these turbulent times,” said Fernanda Catarino, head of channel Europe at Fujitsu.

Those Select partners concerned that the current trading conditions might have an impact on their ability to hit targets and maintain their status have been told that the vendor is extending the deadlines for submission of target sales agreements without partners losing rebates.

Along with the financial support, the vendor is also ramping up online technical and sales support for partners.

The crisis has accelerated the implementation across Europe of digital tools via the PartnerApp. Resellers can access distributors’ stock availability, prices, promotions and news via their mobile phones.

There are also options to request marketing development funds and get special pricing via the MDF tool and the Select Connect Platform.

Partners are also able to access the Fujitsu TechCommunity platform and get a vast range of training materials to make sure they keep their skills sharp.

Efforts to support partners are not just confined to those that have a strong background in the hardware world. Earlier in May, software player Adobe revealed it was also increasing the support for its channel.

In a blog post, Gary Specter, vice-president and head of global commercial business at Adobe, said that it would be rewarding partners and developers for work they did to improve the vendor’s ecosystem during the crisis.

“To help Magento solution partners in the Adobe Solution Partner Programme and the hundreds of developers that they employ, we’re announcing a new program that enables our partners to temporarily allocate their Magento talent to Adobe development projects, including Magento Community Engineering Programme initiatives, to help us accelerate the Magento product roadmap,” he wrote.

“Our community engineering team facilitates and orchestrates contributions from developers globally and allows us to introduce new features, performance improvements and extend our capabilities for the benefit of merchants. Magento solutions partners contributed nearly 50% of the code in the community engineering programme in 2019,” he added.

He said that the idea was to give independent software vendors (ISVs) and partners something else to focus on to keep staff busy during the current situation.

“This initiative will provide our solution partners with significant funding to re-deploy skilled Magento development resources and lessen the need to furlough or lay off highly skilled team members due to business disruptions.

“The goal of this programme is to enable our solution partners to plan for recovery and rapidly scale back normal operations once customer project demands pick up in the future,” he stated.