Transactional, ad-hoc relationships are no longer a viable option, he adds. “Deeper relationships need to be forged which incorporate trust, commitment and the sharing of specialist knowledge in order to secure the continued trust of our customers.”
Trial and error
Trilogy’s Ian Butler says a channel partner’s job is to keep up with new technology and keep developing an understanding of what’s current and what’s coming down the track and be able to give practical advice to its users. The company is also finding that contract management is very important, especially in an evolving market. Trilogy has developed a number of new partnerships as a trusted adviser and IT services company and new relationships with cloud providers, although he admits it “can be a trial and error situation”.
He expects that companies will become more open to how they deploy infrastructure and where they put it as cloud develops so it is “imperative for us to keep developing what we do” and keep abreast of the systems and technologies that can help manage not just the infrastructure but the data and information, wherever it is.
“People are starting to use more cloud-based applications and they need to make a decision when going down a particular road that there’s a route out as well,” he warns. “It’s true of applications, data storage and using cloud-based infrastructure. If you decide to change tack, you need to have an exit strategy.”
One of the more intriguing aspects of the emergence of the cloud is not just in how it is being used for the migration or provision of infrastructure, workloads and applications, Triangle’s Richard O’Brien reveals, but also in how organisations are looking to apply the cloud business model to their on-premise infrastructure.
“When customers see that model, they look at their existing legacy estate and what they might still need on premise and start to look for similar model for on-premise. They ask ‘If I can buy service out there, can I pay for it in-house on the same basis?’ A lot of those conversations are going on at the moment as well. Essentially, it’s about an on-premise managed service but wrapping in the infrastructure while the customer uses its own staff.”
You need to be able to talk as adequately to the finance director as you have been to the IT director” – Liam Halpin, Dell
They’re looking at the consumption model that’s available in the cloud and wondering why they can’t do something similar with their internal infrastructure. O’Brien says there aren’t many channel partners able to provide that at the moment and it’s something vendors are struggling with as well because “they want to take the revenue at the point the sale happens”.
The partner comes into play with the relationship it can develop with financial services companies because vendor financial arms “can’t get their head around this stuff and it’s not a single vendor solution either. To get it all financed from vendors, you’d be dealing with a range of different options with different T&Cs and customers like to have just one”.
That might not be quite the “new style of IT” many vendors will be comfortable with but the fact there is still a place for channel partners in it shows just how strong and lasting their role is, whatever style of IT happens to be in fashion.
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