Courting the channel: Going native

In addition to credit, stockholding and logistics are also important parts of the distributor’s armoury. As well as providing the products it has distribution agreements for, Westcoast can also source products from the UK parent and bundle together products it doesn’t carry to deliver to customers on behalf of resellers. For example, “some large resellers have multiple vendor relationships and one customer might want Samsung, Lenovo and Apple. We don’t do Lenovo or Apple in Ireland but we can deliver all three to the user and become almost a staging point”.

He also mentions the distributor’s website as a valuable service for resellers. Westcoast has invested “a lot of time and money in our website” where resellers can find their own quotes and configurations, download marketing material and order Microsoft licences online.

Footprint
Asked why Irish resellers should deal with Westcoast, he replies: “The vendors we work with are the best known in the business. Then there’s the footprint we have on the ground here. Also, we’re building a solutions lab to use for testing and to train resellers. We will also allow resellers to use it as a demo facility and testing environment.” The distributor hopes to have the lab up and running in June.

 

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Dunne says it is constantly looking at new products to supplement and complement those it already carries in enterprise, retail and B2B. “We’re open for any vendor across all areas,” he comments. “We’re here and we want to break into new business and new areas.”

Westcoast recently took on Huawei and there are plans to formally launch the arrangement in the near future. “It’s a big company with a wide range of products. The networking products supplement HP and there are good opportunities in the telco space and data centre business in Ireland,” he believes.

The distributor is very much “open to do business with resellers. We have a pipeline of expertise, we have presence and we have footprint. We have been here 30 years [through Clarity] and we are backed up by a large company in the UK”.

Westcoast is putting more effort into marketing itself in Ireland. It was “delighted” to win Distributor of the Year at the 2013 ICT Excellence Awards and is sponsoring an award this year at the forthcoming Tech Excellence Awards. It is also “in the process of signing off a deal to do some sponsorship in the Irish Open in Fota”.

Dunne says the distributor “has cemented our business in Ireland as we’ve grown seven to right per cent year on year. It’s time to make an extra push with the upturn in the economy, put our heads above the parapet and tell people we’re here and scream and shout about it”.

Westcoast Ireland has enjoyed “a very good start to the year” and Dunne is “looking forward to the rest of 2014. So many partners have survived the tough times, so there should be some optimism if they’ve survived that,” he remarks. With some resellers not possessing the same level of technical capability in-house as they used to have, there is an opportunity for the distributor to “position ourselves as a support and value partner and they can become sales engines”.

Vendors want their resellers to be the experts in their technology but the cost of providing that is very expensive as is maintaining that level of expertise, “especially when vendors themselves are reducing their expertise in-house. We see ourselves as the fall-back for those guys”. He believes partners with a good sales engine can survive in the Irish market even if they “probably wouldn’t survive in other markets. We have the logistics, support and services behind to support them and as the good times start to come back, I think we’re ideally positioned”.

Asked to sum up Westcoast’s message to resellers in 2014, he replies: “We’re here, we’re flexible, we’re on a growth path, we want to do business and we’re open for business. We want to be distributor of the year again.”