Not everything, not everywhere, not all at once
“I can tell you the channel community is super excited to be able to sell both products because the combination of both products allows them to cover every vertical, every use case, in every geography” – HPE CEO Antonio Neri (pictured).
Those are the words the HPE boss used in a recent conference call with Wall Street analysts concerning its plans for Aruba and Juniper Networks when reporting the first combined HPE-Juniper results. And there’s no denying there’s a logic to what he’s saying.
It’s a sort of modern twist on the old IBM model where Big Blue could sell you anything and everything you needed in a particular technology segment, although the big differentiator compared to now was that the channel didn’t always get to sell all of the products and might be restricted over which customers it could sell them to.
Anyway, there’s a natural rhythm almost where large vendors that can offer certain products in a technology segment acquire or merge with vendors that also operate in the same space but with a different emphasis or focus, even if there may be some overlap between them.
Many are lured by the prospect of being able to “cover every vertical, every use case, in every geography”. Who wouldn’t be?
Setting limits
But there are caveats. For instance, there are probably quite a lot of channel partners selling one vendor’s products who don’t sell the other’s and vice versa purely because they don’t cover every vertical or use case or geography – and have no intention of doing so. Not everybody wants to sell everything to everyone.
If the two product sets are such that you can integrate them successfully and enable partners to sell the wider range to their customers without having to put in too much effort, that’s all well and good. But then, if they were separate before and the customer was being served by one partner for vendor X and another for vendor Y, then one of those partners is going to lose out when the customer can get the combined vendor XY products from a single partner. Stands to reason, right?
There’s also the possibility that support levels decrease because while partner A was very specialised in selling and supporting vendor X’s products and partner B was similarly qualified for vendor Y’s, neither is likely to be as good in selling and supporting the combined vendor XY product suite. That sounds logical, doesn’t it?
Perhaps that will cause a ripple effect where the solution to ensuring the same, if not better support for the combined vendor XY products, is if partner A acquires partner B or vice versa.
The other scenario is that it causes some partners who were happy selling vendor X or vendor Y to become disaffected with their lot when they need to be able to sell vendor XY to continue to be successful.
But the point is that when this type of acquisition or merger happens, the choice that partners made before it to focus on one vendor over another no longer applies. In many ways, they really have no option but to follow the new roadmap and strategy outlined by vendor XY or switch to the completely different vendor Z. That could be quite an inconvenience if they had previously chosen not sell to vendor Z’s products because they preferred vendor X or Y’s.
In his comments, Neri claimed that “customers want both [products] today, and we can serve every market vertical, and we can also deploy any type of solution, whether it is cloud-based, virtual private cloud, sovereign or on-prem”.
But while it might be true customers want both products, it might also be true that not all of them want both from the same source. It’s also natural that there will be some level of friction between vendor X’s ongoing development of a product and vendor XY’s need to integrate it more tightly with vendor Y’s, for example.
All of which is by way of saying that while a vendor may believe it is able to serve every market vertical, every use case and every geography, that doesn’t mean all of its partners and customers will agree that they want it to.
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