Distributor Insights

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John Conlon, enterprise sales manager, Sharptext  

Sharptext has identified three key areas where it is looking to help partners develop their business.

The first is in helping them to deal with resource constraints. With Irish partners running very lean organisations, they can experience resource shortfalls in particular areas. Sharptext is focusing efforts to help partners bridge those resource gaps. It has recruited Gerry Clarke, who has 10 years experience in the storage business, to work with partners around storage. He is available to assist partners with education, enablement and customer visits. Sharptext has also invested in demonstration equipment, making enterprise class equipment available to partners without the overhead.

With partners looking outside traditional enterprise and public sector areas to drive incremental business, Sharptext is also putting significant effort into enabling and educating them develop the mid-market and SME sectors. Conlon reveals it has successfully run regular "bootcamps" for partners to get up to speed more quickly. It also works hard "to ensure items such as price and availability do not become a sales blocker". The cloud is the third area where Sharptext is trying to support partners by helping them understand the implications and opportunities of cloud-based services.

The distributor is running a series of quarterly briefings focusing on how the cloud will develop within an Irish context, and how partners can avail of the opportunity. The content of each session is driven by feedback from attendees at the previous session which, Conlon says, ensures "the focus is where the partners want it to be". 

Justin Owens, managing director, Commtech 

Owens highlights storage as a big growth area with EMC. The vendor is traditionally seen as very high-end and targeted at large enterprises but it has come down the stack into the SMB space.

He suggests that mid-sized resellers may find it difficult to sell into accounts that have an incumbent vendor. EMC provides resellers with a viable alternative to sell to potential customers. The EMC reseller channel has grown in breadth and depth over the last 12 months and having transitioned to the channel model, he believes it is a good option for resellers.

But he warns that "in three to four years time there will be a relatively mature channel and the opportunity will be gone." Owens also believes the unified communications (UC) space is an interesting area, particularly Microsoft’s Lync platform, a full-blown PBX with unified messaging and video communication capabilities built-in. With the takeover of CT3 last year, Commtech acquired a portfolio of products that fit around Lync.

Owens thinks Microsoft is in a strong position because it owns the other infrastructure companies use. While it’s still early days, the distributor has already had some useful wins for partners with Lync. Owens argues Cisco and Avaya don’t have the tight integration Microsoft has into other platforms that customers are using. And yet again, partners also have the opportunity to make their mark when the channel is not so grown up and Microsoft is still looking for partners.

Cloud is an interesting area, although it does present a threat to smaller resellers. For those who have grown up selling small business servers or Exchange, they will need to get accustomed to the idea of SMB customers going to the cloud over the next few years.

"Resellers need to be thinking about where the business will come from in the future," he says, adding that it’s difficult to see the opportunity and there’s potentially more downside than upside.

Nevertheless, no one can hold back the shift to the cloud. "If resellers don’t deliver what customers want, there won’t be a long-term success in that," Owens warns. They need to ask themselves some searching questions: Where’s their value, what do they do, how can they add value to the customer? Do they have to reposition themselves? What makes them relevant to the customer?

It’s important for resellers to develop their own niche and to be excellent at something. Too many resellers are very ‘me too’. It helps if they can be in an area where people spend money, where the end accounts are going to have money.

On a practical level, Owens says having an effective CRM system is also something worth looking at. Commtech implemented their system four years ago. "If I knew how useful it would be, I would have put it in a long time ago," he comments. "It’s so useful and effective." He highlights the way in which it helps to improve opportunity tracking and marketing to resellers. Ready access to customer base segmentation is another benefit resellers could get from a CRM system for marketing activities.

He says it’s amazing that a lot of successful companies have very limited infrastructure for their own marketing. "There’s a good return on investment (ROI) from having that sort of thing properly organised" Owens adds. "It’s easier to do and the overhead is less. You can turn things around quickly with less fuss."

Michael Conway, director, Renaissance 

Conway is quick to stress that security is not so straightforward as people think, and in his experience very few partners have good security knowledge or focus. The best thing Renaissance can do as a value added distributor is to provide lots of security knowledge and focus and work with partners when they identify potential security opportunities.

One of the things the distributor’s account managers need to do is to act as business development managers for partners to help them find profitable and worthwhile opportunities. Conway says it’s important to concentrate on managed services or products resellers can convert into managed services. A lot of platforms Renaissance distributes can be delivered in managed service partner type model. This helps resellers to play into the cloud by offering managed mail services, archiving, AV and security protection services.

He says channel partners and resellers that don’t embrace managed services and the cloud probably won’t be around in two years time because their competitors will adopt them and put them at a cost and services disadvantage.

For distributor salespeople, it’s important to do more than talk about products. They need to spend a lot of time on where the market is and where people need to be going, so they need to be aware of what’s happening in the wider market. "Effectively, we’re trying to make it easy for them to get customers onboard, embrace them and deliver wraparound services. Ultimately, they will have a closer, tighter relationship with the customer."

Renaissance can "deliver everything for the reseller to effectively become a managed service provider and value added cloud provider". The attraction is that once you create the platform, you can grow the licence requirement as when you grow volume. "Once people move into it, they don’t tend to swap out of it very quickly," Conway claims. "They are relatively sticky type services."

Many companies in the channel are very good technically, but from a business perspective they are probably challenged in terms of understanding where everything is going and how it will impact them, which is something Renaissance can help them with.

Cloud doesn’t necessarily help resellers and it can confuse things, Conway argues. "In reality, we can deliver a lot of what they need without a huge amount of cost. By providing white label services and products, resellers create their own identity rather than opting for something like Microsoft’s Office 365 or BPOS which doesn’t give them any benefit.

With a white label service, the local channel partner is still available if the service goes down and he knows the customer environment. "If you own the relationship with them, the customer knows who to blame and who to call," Conway says, unlike with Office 365 where the customer is reliant on Microsoft to fix the service.

"It’s like when there’s a power cut. You can ring ESB, but it will be back when it’s back," he argues. Customers might be more comfortable knowing there’s somebody on their case who is looking after them at a local level and is able to respond quickly and effectively.

Garnett Stewart, general manager, SquareOne 

The education market has been reasonably buoyant over the last couple of years with the commitment from government to put projectors into schools and it’s helped to bring on technology within the classroom. While the €10,000 budget isn’t there anymore schools may still have smaller pots available that they have developed through fundraising, so SquareOne is encouraging partners to look at add-on products such as visualisers, document cameras, wireless mice and keyboards.

On the corporate side, projector lamp replacement costs are becoming an area to look at with a lot of manufacturers making their filters better, reducing the amount of cleaning required. LED projectors are starting to come onto the market as well and they don’t have a replaceable lamp. For people thinking of installing projectors in a lecturer room, it might make sense to think of this when they realise they might need scaffolding if they have to replace the lamp.

SquareOne is also focusing on providing more in-house training. The distributor has set up its own training room and is providing sessions in areas such as TV over IP and voice over CAT5.

SquareOne is always looking at what products it can bring on or move to other markets. With the education market likely to slow down over the next six months, people need to look at what they can recoup in the corporate or SME market. It plans to introduce new products and new brands and it helps that as part of a larger group, SquareOne has the ability to choose products to bring into the Irish market.

"We will continue to try to broaden our product range and expertise and pass it on to the reseller community," Stewart states. "We’re looking to bring over brands and products that are successful in the UK." He also stresses the importance of getting the sales force talking to customers all the time. There may not be opportunities all the time but it’s important to be there when they arise. It’s also important to get out and meet people face to face, "to sit down, have a chat and see where they’re going".

Conor McGrogran, territory manager, Steljes McGrogan is keen to focus on Smart’s collaboration solutions which bring major advantages for businesses by reducing travel costs, cutting down the time taken to get to meetings and the problems trying to co-ordinate everybody’s diaries, while also enabling them to access expert advice and share data in real time. He says there has been huge interest from corporates, especially US multinationals, as the ability to share data in real time across multiple locations is especially appealing.

The solution is a combined hardware and software platform but customers can use the hardware or software with other vendors’ equipment. Microsoft software, for instance, can be used on top of Smart hardware. System integrators should find it attractive because they can plug it into an existing video conferencing solution and it will work with it. "It can complement and integrate with any existing solution they may have at the moment," McGrogan claims.

Showing data in real-time adds another dimension to the meeting and the solution is scalable so it can work for small businesses and enterprises. Typically with video conferencing, the content of what has been discussed is thrown up on the board and then disappears. The ability to make notes and save and e-mail them to other participants afterwards helps people participate more in the meeting.

Michael Callaghan, managing director, CMS Ireland 

Like Stewart, Callaghan says face to face meetings are important, and CMS has a team of business development managers on the road that are constantly engaging with key customers. "You can’t beat face to face meetings," he says. "There’s only so much you can do over the phone or computer or by e-mail." As the Irish market is still driven very much by relationships, it’s important to maintain them.

The recent purchase of CCI Distribution has brought CMS 25 new brands to talk to customers about, and Callaghan believes it should have a very busy quarter. The focus is on "quick wins" and there are some immediate ones that he expects will be "a very positive fit for the Irish market". There are up and coming vendors such as QNAP and QSAN, getting a lot of interest from B2B customers, and CCI also brings security on board, which Callaghan labels an "exciting vertical", with strong offerings in CCTV and IP cameras.

"It gives us more to talk to resellers about and more opportunities for them to bring to customers," he says.

Like Owens, Callaghan extols the virtue of having a CRM system. CMS implemented Salesforce.com 18 months ago and it’s proved to be invaluable. "Anybody in business is driving in the dark if they don’t have a CRM system," he says. The big benefit is that it allows vendors, distributors and resellers to track their pipeline and engagement and to get a sense of where they are winning and losing.

CMS has also been looking at how it interacts with its channel partners. A lot of companies are operating with fewer staff and they don’t have the people to send away to events where they might be out of the office for most of the day, so CMS is focusing on niche events that don’t keep people away from work for too long. For example, it has technology nights, usually in the centre of Dublin that give partners the opportunity to attend demonstrations along with a meal and a few drinks.

Another initiative has been the introduction of weekly webinars based around a key technology and a key sales area. Callaghan says it’s working because people are willing to give their lunchtime to a webinar and get an opportunity to engage with vendors for open discussions. "It’s gone down very well," he comments. "It allows resellers to look at something without committing. If they are interested, we can follow up with a meeting." The webinars also help because, as Callaghan notes, there’s nothing worse than arriving at a meeting and sitting down only to experience the dawning realisation after five minutes that "this is not for me".

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