It’s blindingly obvious to most people who live here that the Irish market is not as big as the UK’s. You would also hope it’s blindingly obvious to most people who live anywhere else.
The most common unit of measurement people in Ireland deploy to give an idea of the scale of the local IT market to people outside the country is to compare it to Manchester. To keep things simple, Ireland is one Manchester. It’s surprising how often though, companies from outside Ireland are guilty of failing to grasp the true size of the Irish market.
This can manifest itself in a number of ways. One of the most blatant, though often unremarked, are the targets set by vendors for their various accreditations. A platinum or gold accreditation in the US (or the UK for that matter) has revenue targets and staffing requirements attached to it that have no relevance to markets like Ireland. And yet companies in Ireland often have to achieve conditions which are, given the size of the market, far more onerous than for their counterparts in much larger countries.
So it’s interesting when a vendor recognises this fact and changes its certifications to reflect the local market. Kevin Bland, Citrix Northern Europe director for channel and alliances, claims the vendor has done just that with its latest revamp: "The big news is that we’ve been sensitive to local markets. You can’t set the same bar in Ireland for platinum as in the US."
He describes it as moving away from "applying a silly number globally" to an accreditation by applying targets that are "proportionate to the market". For instance, Bland says platinum in the US has an entry point of more than $3 billion and eight certified sales people and eight certified technical staff. In Ireland, that figure is $700,000 (€543,000) and the requirement is for three certified sales and technical staff.
The bar has been similarly reduced for the gold and silver accreditations.
According to Bland, the changes, announced on 1 May, are generating a positive response from Irish partners. Where historically Citrix had two platinum partners, he reveals that five or six have ambitions to try and achieve it this time around. He estimates that a further 10-15 partners are expressing an interest in going for gold.
This suggests that changing the scope of accreditations to reflect the realities of local markets helps to make them more realisable to resellers on the ground. In turn, this also gives them the potential for gaining extra kudos with customers in their own territories.
The potential downside is that the value of a certification could be devalued on a wider level if, for example, platinum means one thing in one country and something else in another, but given that nearly all accreditations are applied at a national level rather than a multinational one, the risk shouldn’t be too severe. It’s also the case that accreditations, on the whole, are not usually transferable from one country to another in any case.
To a certain degree, they are a bit like a national currency that can be used only in the country they apply. The problem has been that the vendors who set the certifications have sought to apply them at a local level but attached them to a fixed set of requirements that they demand equally from all territories irrespective of their size. Remind you of anything else?
Anyway, injecting some flexibility into the process should help make certifications more relevant to the individual markets and more attainable to local partners. There may be an extra amount of bureaucracy if vendors choose not to apply blanket definitions of certifications across Europe and opt to set criteria at a country level, but it could be well worth the effort.
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