Resellers are also affected by vendors’ efforts to have a direct engagement with customers, he suggests. “So the channel, as a two-tier value add model with distribution and reseller, is increasingly working in unison to provide best practice solutions to customers,” Harvey comments. Notice that he doesn’t use the FSD term, preferring to stick to the old VAD label. “The role of the value added distributor is to source innovative new products and find and bring to market technologies best suited to take advantage of the changes under way in the marketplace.”
“Pretty much every distributor out there, globally, claims to be a VAD which has diluted the understanding of its value” – Michael O’Hara, Data Solutions
He says Commtech has bundled complementary product sets “into logical lines of business with technical and pre-sales expertise focused on the advantage to the reseller on proposing the combined offering. This can help the reseller in many ways, not least offering a one-stop shop for application solutions but, more importantly, proffering a proven architecture and interoperability suite”. Another key sales support VADs offer is sales and product training, while “workshops, vendor training boot camps and solution sales days are all part of our full service promise to resellers”.
Resellers’ role
Before moving on to the subject of FSDs, Michael Jackson, managing director at Tech Data Ireland, is keen to stress the value that resellers add. “It’s important to say that there will always be value that the reseller adds through its own knowledge and experience of solutions or markets that a distributor can’t replicate. Our role as a distributor is to enable and empower the reseller – and make it easy for it to do business in whatever way we can.”
Like Harvey, he’s not quite ready to give up on the notion of adding value in distribution in favour of FSD yet. “Most of the value – on top of the choice, availability and credit – that we add is in the pre-sales stage, helping partners to identify the right products for their customers and to present and demonstrate those solutions to the customer,” he says. “It is very important for us to be sensitive to the needs of resellers and work with them to ensure they can add value and build strong relationships with their customers.”
Paul Bale, head of marketing at Exertis, is under no illusions that “distribution has moved way beyond logistics and credit lines”, adding that Exertis delivers “a full value chain of support to enable our customers to deliver value to their customers”. He lists several services provided by Exertis including a number of hardy perennials such as stock and configuration, logistics, finance, marketing, vendor programmes and training. While pre-sales and technical support is nothing new as such, it has probably gone to a deeper level in terms of providing expert advice to compile quotations and secure bids and the distributor is also in the process of rolling out managed service offerings to resellers.
Bale also believes that the distributor can provide a comprehensive offering through its ability to offer a pan-European capability, anchored to local in-country knowledge and relationships with a choice of vendors across B2B, enterprise, retail, mobile and managed print. “We are very tuned in to the Irish market and to what our Irish partners are experiencing. In turn, we are continually striving to add to what our partners can expect in terms of our service offering,” Bale adds.
Present and correct
O’Hara at Data Solutions says the role the distributor plays in the channel depends to some extent on the vendor involved. For example, well-established companies with a significant presence on the ground, such as Cisco, Microsoft and Dell, may have a direct touch channel and user focused account managers in Ireland whereas new but little-known vendors may have no resources in Ireland.
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