The sad lot of the reseller

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(Source: Stockfresh)

“When the customer was looking for HP servers
But you only had IBM and Sun,
You lost the deal for supply (and for service)
The reseller’s lot is not a happy one.

The customer wants more services in the cloud
And you tell him you can only give him one,
He switches his provider and you cry out loud
The reseller’s lot is not a happy one.”

It’s not often that I’m moved to seek inspiration from comic opera. Never actually. Being an unenlightened pleb, I’m more familiar with the works of Gilbert O’Sullivan than those of Gilbert and Sullivan but I do remember the title of one of their songs, A Policeman’s Lot (Is Not A Happy One).

Anyway, it occurred to me while reading a press release with the rather wordy headline ‘New research should act as a wake-up call for resellers to evolve their cloud services in line with their customers’ requirements’ that, like the policeman, the reseller can sometimes appear to be in an unenviable position in the IT supply chain.

Quoting surveys by 451 Research and the Cloud Industry Forum, cloud services provider outsourcery said customers were not satisfied with their cloud suplier because it had not been able to keep up with their evolving requirements.

Co-CEO Piers Linney said it was “great to see” more IT departments were using outsourced providers to deploy cloud-based services within their organisations, but warned that as departments became more comfortable with outsourcing IT provision they would expect a broader range of cloud deployment options from their supplier.

“The universe of IT and UC (unified communications) suppliers will divide into those that make the substantial investment required in new platforms, systems, intellectual property and personnel, versus those that focus on offering professional services and reselling subscription services. Many organisations in this space will not be able to achieve either,” he predicted.

Yet again, resellers are caught in the middle as customers start to make demands that they need to find suppliers to meet. If those suppliers aren’t up to the mark, it’s the resellers that will get the blame. As Linney puts it, if resellers are “going to face demands for greater product and service offerings from their customers, they in turn need to assess their partners to make sure that they can swiftly respond in the same way”. If they don’t, well, they might end up singing the chorus in their very own opera. And it won’t be a comic one.

Read More: Billy MacInnes Blog