Major IT vendors aim to deliver more managed services in 2007 as a way to drive profit for themselves and for channel partners.

That was a key theme of a panel discussion Tuesday at CRN's 10th annual Industry Hall Of Fame event in San Jose, Calif., where executives shared their strategies for adopting new technologies and tactics to maintain healthy profit margins for solution provider partners.

Greg Van Acker, vice president of U.S. channel sales at Oki Data, said the concept of print managed services is a pillar of his company's strategy for ensuring future profitability. Oki Data has 15 to 20 solution providers testing the services, and the early returns are promising, he said.

"We don't even have hardware margin conversations with solution providers anymore. Instead, we talk about blended hardware margins that print managed services can lock in," Van Acker said.

John Paget, president of the Technology Solutions division at distributor Synnex, said print managed services are one way of taking a relatively low-margin business — selling printers — and making it consultative and profitable. "You're creating a relationship with the customer that's lasting and doing it in a way that doesn't require your own feet on the street," he said.

Hewlett-Packard has created content around managed services and delivered that message to partners, said Tom LaRocca, vice president of partner development and programs at HP.

"Once you sit down with the partners and go through the ROI, they sit back and go, 'Wow.' It's a win for everyone, and partners have an annuity stream down the road," LaRocca said.

Business planning is another key to partner profitability, according to the panelists, who discussed business planning initiatives under way in their respective channel programs.

HP, for instance, has started to align sales resources in field with partner competencies, LaRocca said. The company is seeing a rising number of partners who want to develop a second core competency, he added.

Synnex is encouraging partners to add cross-vertical competencies, according to Paget. For example, the distributor is trying to bring data VARs into the voice world and is offering training and specialization to reach that goal, he said.