17 March 2008
by Alex Scroxton
Alcatel-Lucent business partners look set to benefit from a partnership signed between its main convergence distributor, Sphinx, and integrator and Alcatel-Lucent Premium Business Partner Redbridge, which will allow them to enlist technical assistance when selling into new business areas.
The tie-up will initially cover Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniPCX Enterprise, OmniPCX Office and Extended Communications Server products.
According to Trevor Evans, business development manager at Alcatel-Lucent, the distributor hopes to sign partnerships with other Premium Business Partners in the coming months.
"A lot of our resellers are getting requests from customers to get involved in wireless LAN, so Sphinx could look to partner with an Alcatel-Lucent partner with expertise in deploying those solutions," explained Evans, although he declined to give further names.
Mark Hatton, managing director at Sphinx, said: "We’ve seen that there’s a fair amount of skills required because IP solutions aren’t that simple. We want all our partners to be accredited on IP at a basic level, but rather than getting everybody skilled up further we can act as a skills aggregator."
The Redbridge partnership will expand on what has, so far, been a successful partnership between Sphinx and Franco-American Alcatel-Lucent. The vendor achieved double-digit growth in its UK enterprise distribution business last year, and Sphinx has already posted record monthly distribution revenues for January.
Evans also revealed Sphinx now accounts for more than half of Alcatel-Lucent’s SMB revenues.
