In the New England area, the split is 70-30, with the direct sales force garnering the larger share, says channel manager Craig Brenner. VARs' superiority in selling services struck home for iPass Inc., too, when the Mountain View, Calif., company launched a corporate-access service in July 1997. When it began looking for corporate sales, iPass made overtures to both VARs and ISPs. But it was among VARs, not ISPs, that iPass has found its greatest sales alliances. Large chunk of iPass's sales are through security VARs who sell to corporations needing remote access to their corporate LAN for their remote or traveling em- ployees.
VARs are good at understanding the network.
So far, iPass has signed up 20 resellers, many of them smaller firms. It's hard to retrain their sales folks. Among VARs, it can also be hard to retrain sales representatives in some of the new technologies. Selecting a partner and signing a contract are just the first steps. But not all of the VARs are contributing their share of the boost in ISP revenues.