Inside the Channel

Financing options for VARs

More customers are looking for financing options from their VARs these days, but credit is hard to come by, whether you're trying to buy a new home or a new network for your business. Fortunately, there are still a few vendors out there who have deep enough pockets to provide these options.

A recent report on Microsoft's own financing options brought this to light. With financing becoming part of the sales presentation more often, Microsoft VARs have something to bring to the table. A couple of recent financing promotions include the SmartPay plan, which applies until June 30, which gives a "no payments for six months" option. Also, good through march 20 is a zero percent finance option for Microsoft Dynamics ERP and new customers implementing Dynamics CRM.

To Microsoft's credit, they also continue their Total Solutions Financing Program, which lets the reseller's customer finance the whole cost of the solution, not just the Microsoft parts. The "whole solution financing" approach is a great idea for vendors, unfortunately, a few of the bigger ones are starting to drop this concept, to the detriment of their own channels. The economy's only going to get worse for the next year at least, and credit will continue to be scarce--it wouldn't surprise me if more large vendors started offering creative financing options like this.

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