There's a lot that goes into building the right channel program and making sure it keeps pace with industry changes.

In a panel held at the Women Of The Channel Winter Workshop in New York City this week, top channel executives discussed just that, giving their thoughts on what goes into building a great channel program.

Take a look at what they had to say.

Lisa Mackenzie, SVP, The Channel Company: What do you see as the macro changes in the industry and how is that affecting your channel? What are the biggest issues you are facing today and how are you addressing it?

Pam Johansen, Sr. Director, Worldwide Channel Operations, BMC Software: At BMC, our biggest challenge is moving our partners from being a premise software provider to being more of a SaaS provider. That's a huge chasm to cross for us. What we're doing right now is we're actually moving how we look at business and we're actually building out a new program that we're going to be introducing in the near future that's going to have probably less focus on potentially the resell part of this but basically more on the services side. It's huge. It's kind of game changing for us, but that's how we're going to try and address it.
Paula Gil, Director of Partner Programs, CA: I would say, from a CA perspective, helping our partners find a way to keep pace with the change in the industry and really, from a program design perspective, how can you really map out and help partners absorb a program that needs to constantly change, constantly serve their needs and ultimately serve the needs of the customers? The days of one year programs are gone. We need to be thinking quarter by quarter and really be able to not only evolve the program, but also the partners' skill set to match customer demand and evolution.

Penny Philpot, Group VP, OPN Program & Worldwide Partner Services, Oracle: I would echo, first of all, Pam [Johansen]'s point about taking our partners and our business colleagues into the cloud. I know everyone's very excited about it, but I don't think anyone's quite worked out exactly how to do it. I think we're all very excited puppies or little cats trying to herd everyone..., trying to get everyone to put it together and be able to offer something cohesive to our partners. I'm struggling with that one, so if anyone's got any great ideas please let me know. The other one that I'd also say is particularly profound in our industry is also the segmentation. When do we take a customer directly? When do we use a partner? How do we make sure the partner is motivated, even if the customer decides to buy directly? All of those scenarios...I would say those are my biggest pains and whats-its at the moment.

NEXT: Bridging The Gap