RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 53



		by William Van Winkle
		About a year ago, there was a potential advertiser who'd just received his sample copy of RAM. This particular vendor concentrated in SMB products, but the particular cover story in that issue happened to be on desktop graphics. Said would-be advertiser looked at the picture of a cutting edge 3D card on the cover, opened up the magazine at random to find a full-page ad for NVIDIA graphics technology, and declared on the spot that RAM wasn't a good advertising fit because this was obviously "a gaming magazine." Being misunderstood is that easy, and no one is exempt. As a case in point, NVIDIA, the company that helped unwittingly confound our short attention span-prone advertiser, is also engaged in a wide-flung campaign to reshape how many people perceive its business. "Historically, NVIDIA has been known for our high-end products and as a gaming-centric company," says NVIDIA's Timo Allison, manager, global channel programs, "but we've made a very conscious effort to move into the mainstream space. Over the last year, we've worked really hard to make our products and tools relevant to a wider customer base than in the past." Examples aren't in short supply if you know to look for them. While consumer press headlines continue to obsess over whether ATI's X1900 can pull down more frames per second in F.E.A.R. than NVIDIA's new 7900 GTX, few realize that NVIDIA actually beat ATI's AVIVO to market with its home theater video optimization technology, PureVideo. Moreover, of the major IGP vendors, NVIDIA is the only one that has a current-generation chipset that meets its own video optimization platform specs. ATI's X200 is not AVIVO-compliant, and the Intel 965G, rumored to offer "Intel Clear Video technology," isn't expected until the second half of this year. Moreover, the new GeForce-based motherboards offer a slight performance edge versus the competition and, after considering the Forceware perks, offer a much broader feature set. Given that IGP-based motherboards are becoming an increasingly popular foundation for multimedia-centric PCs, this leaves NVIDIA in a very strong but surprisingly underpublicized position. I've maintained ever since the nForce3 days that NVIDIA's integrated nForce firewall and RAID functionality should have taken the market by storm, and perhaps this is where being a close AMD ally worked against NVIDIA's chipset breakthroughs. These features were too advanced for the consumer mainstream to grasp, the businesses that should have fallen all over them were too closely tied to Intel platforms. Add to this the fact that Forceware functionality of old, somewhat like PureVideo functionality of today, was often an afterthought in NVIDIA marketing. But the world has changed. AMD is a much more accepted solution in consumer and commercial circles. SLI technology, previously the domain of affluent geeks, is now a valid upgrade strategy for mainstream buyers, and you can find SLI as readily on Intel platforms as AMD. The back office—close to 95% of all Opteron-based PCIe servers use NVIDIA core logic—is now providing something of a conduit to the front office as managers realize more and more that graphics and performance can make a big difference in productivity anywhere in the enterprise. The upshot is that there is a massive amount of opportunity, and NVIDIA has worked to put the tools in place to capitalize on this. The company is becoming a mainstream force rather than a high-end niche vendor, but to make this happen the company needs a reseller channel able to first understand the tools NVIDIA has made available and then communicate them to the market. Until recently, NVIDIA's assistance to the channel in making this happen has been limited, but help is increasingly available on several fronts. Even before now, NVIDIA had a decent channel program. NVIDIA's merchandizing kits for channel partners are among the most creative in the field, the company's demo programs are decent, and there is no minimum volume requirement keeping smaller integrators out in the cold. But one of the biggest reasons some builders shy away from the AMD platform is not because of the processors but the motherboards and other third-party platform elements around them. This is the spirit behind why NVIDIA added the Authorized Board Partner and Distribution Program. "We formed the Authorized program in part because of requests from our reseller community," says NVIDIA's Allison. "We have a lot of manufacturing partners that produce our products, and resellers were asking for direction on who we felt were the more reliable ones that were building better products and had better support for the channel. So the Authorized program was designed to let them know who we were working with closely." Today, the Authorized program covers over 50 distributors globally and 20 board manufacturers. Here in the U.S., the main Authorized distributors are ASI, D&H, MA Labs, Max Group, Powernode, Supercom, and Synnex. The three board vendors friendliest to the North American channel are ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI. Tied to the Authorized program is NVIDIA's new Sales Center, a move that finally brings a healthy does of interactive humanity to the company's hitherto largely automated channel sales efforts. "With the Sales Center, you'll now get very timely promotional information," explains John Lonergan, vice president, global channel operations. "You've got an account manager that you can contact reactively and who will bring you the latest news in terms of products, platforms, and programs. We all know that the Web is a great mass communication vehicle, but it's not terribly personalized. This Sales Center will give resellers that personalized support." Perhaps the smartest innovation NVIDIA has made to its channel efforts, though, is the NVIDIA Business Platform (NBP) initiative. Complementary to the AMD Commercial Stable Image Platform program it was developed alongside and on top of, the NBP works on a yearly cycle that begins with a three-month evaluation period followed by one year of production followed by a 24-month support phase. The stable image for the 2006 NVIDIA Business Platform started its evaluation phase on September 1st of 2005. Production systems became available on December 1st of 2006 and will extend through December 31st of 2007. Meanwhile, the 2007 Platform will begin evaluations on September 1st of 2006 and so on. Because NVIDIA makes pervasive use of a unified driver architecture, the move from one platform to the next is seamless, and having support parts and driver updates available for an additional two years is all but priceless to corporate accounts more focused on total cost of ownership than up-front purchase pricing. "The ongoing service and support costs are most important," notes NVIDIA Business Platform product manager David Ragones. "Having a PC where none of the hardware or software components change is an important way to manage these costs, because you don't have to think about the hardware or software in this specific system because all of the PCs within the organization are on a stable image. Gartner has actually come up with a figure that there's a 37% savings when moving from an unmanaged to a managed environment within an SMB workplace." The NVIDIA Business Platform targets the key point in the channel where there is maximum potential balanced with best accessibility. The platform program is not being offered to tier-one OEMs. Dell has the stable image program of its Optiplex line, IBM has another for its enterprise station series, and so one, and most if not all of them leverage Intel's Stable Image Platform Program (SIPP). On its own, the AMD stable image initiative is not broad enough to compete against Intel's SIPP; NVIDIA's program remedies that. The NBP makes AMD just as viable of a business solution as Intel. The NBP is targeted at desktops in small and medium businesses, government agencies, and educational institutions, a market that NVIDIA feels accounts for 20 million PC units annually in North America and Europe. The concept of a stable image platform is still fairly new in these circles, and smaller entities in particular may be wholly unfamiliar with it, but given that a typical SMB has hundreds of PCs, the advantages can be overwhelming. The IT hours involved in keeping an organization's systems synchronized, secure, and updated plummets when stable images are universally deployed, particularly across multiple locations. The remote management tools included with a stable image platform like NVIDIA's make all the difference in the world. Additionally, IT managers only need to qualify a system once then can feel confident that identical systems will be available throughout the purchase cycle. Good theory, right? But we all know that boards get revised, chips change, and so on, often with surprising and quiet regularity. Knowing that the audio codec chip was one board-level component that exists outside of NVIDIA's chipset domain, I asked David Ragones what ramifications exist if a motherboard vendor switches audio drivers in mid-cycle. "The same software driver image can be used across motherboards," he answered. "In the audio case, the NVIDIA Business Platform installer recognizes if a different codec is present and installs the appropriate one. Our audio partners have signed contracts that their audio drivers will be stable over the same time period as the NVIDIA Business Platform is certified as stable. This allows system builders the flexibility to source multiple NBP-certified motherboards and install the same driver package." At present, the NVIDIA Business Platform hosts four certified motherboard vendors: ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and MSI. Remote management software arrives courtesy of Altiris and Microsoft. With all of the proper pieces in place, the system builder runs a piece of NVIDIA software called the Compliance Analyzer that validates all of the components within each system that are NBP-certified. Assuming it passes that, the Compliance Analyzer also runs a stress test wherein each major system component is put under load. This is a valuable addition to the testing that a system builder would normally do, and it indicates to the customer an extra level of quality control and standardization embodied in the NVIDIA Business Platform Certified sticker present on the chassis. Ultimately, I think the broader message here is about enablement. From PureVideo to the GeForce IGP to a business-class Intel platform alternative, NVIDIA had most of the pieces in needed already created and on the table, but it lacked a cohesive program that would enable resellers to learn about and sell these items effectively to both consumer and commercial audiences. There is no standout news flash in this story, nothing that grabs you and says "NVIDIA is revolutionizing the industry with this!" Instead, this is about a company that spent the time and resources to get smarter about how to leverage what it already had in play. Resellers can benefit greatly from NVIDIA's channel program innovations and initiatives, but maybe NVIDIA itself is something of a role model in how we should all examine our business assets and question how they can be better integrated and promoted. By assembling the pieces in a smarter fashion, you may just unlock the door to a whole new business arena.

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