Netspace eyes channel sales down south

Melbourne ISP Netspace has rolled out a formal channel program with a view to accelerating its growth and signing 300 resellers by Christmas.

Stuart Marburg, managing director at Netspace, said the vendor did already have quite a few channel partners but had not laid out a specific program for them.

"Channel partners are going to be critical," he said. "System integrators are very important for us, especially in the business and SOHO space. But we're also very keen on retail and home networking."

Netspace did sell direct but promised not to offer better deals than offered via channel partners, Marburg said.

Resellers had staff resources and expertise in selling into the residential, small home office and business spaces that Netspace would never have, he suggested.

Netspace would offer partners an up-front finders fee for all referrals and commission when customers connected to its internet services, Marburg said.

The ISP was setting up an extranet for all channel partners to use that would provide useful support information.

Netspace was also providing a "real time service qualification check" that enabled resellers to quickly check whether a new customer could get DSL, Marburg said.

Resellers could also get a link to Netspace's website which clicked through to a sign-up page. Click-throughs would be tracked by cookie, enabling Netspace to reward the appropriate partner for that customer referral, he said.

However, if a customer disabled cookie access, Netspace did not offer an alternative method of tracking such website referrals, Marburg added.

Further features could be added as time went on. "We'll see how it goes," he said.

"We are in the process of approaching resellers generally at this point in time, mostly in Victoria and Tasmania," he said.

Netspace had been operating a channel program of sorts for the last 12 months but wanted to formalise it, he said.