Technology Reseller - v16

technolog y reseller.co.uk Q&A 33 With Sean Fane, Managing Director of Spectrami UK Technology Reseller (TR) : Why do you think there is room for Spectrami in the UK market? Sean Fane (SF): If we were just distributing the same types of technology as the incumbents in this region, we probably wouldn’t have been interested in becoming another storage distributor or another security distributor – even if the vendors were new and interesting. But there’s recently been a massive shift in the market from traditional silos, where you buy your storage here, your servers there, then your security product, then the desktop on top, to software vendors providing an as-a-service subscription model. As a result, there are now a whole number of users within any given enterprise who are subscribing to various tools to help them do their jobs, to the extent that enterprise IT departments feel they are losing control of their users. People are saying ‘As an enterprise, all we are trying to do is deliver IT services to our employees, to help them do a better job, and overall IT to the company so that it can have some USPs or drive efficiencies. Looking at that as service provision, what is the best way of delivering that? Is it public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud? Do we want self-provisioning by users? If we control too much does that restrict our ability to grow? If we control too little does that make us vulnerable to security attacks or loss of data?’ With all these challenges, it’s actually a great time to come to market with vendors that can help enterprises transition from that old environment to this new environment. This, in turn, helps resellers that are interested in going on this journey with us to win new customers and access opportunities in big enterprises that they wouldn’t be able to do if they were just selling incumbent technology. TR : Are you specialising in storage and security? SF: This is where our offering differs slightly from our parent company’s. Because we had the chance to start with a clean sheet of paper in the UK, we were able to say ‘If we were to build a distributor from scratch, what would we really want to take Spectrami, a pioneer of the Vendor Extension Model (VEM) and a leading distributor of emerging technologies in the Middle East, has set up an independent UK office in partnership with Sean Fane and Jason Dance, erstwhile MDs of IQ-Sys and BigTec respectively. Spectrami has been operating in the UAE for about eight years, where it uses a Vendor Extension Model (VEM) to enable Western and US vendors to establish a foothold in the region. A bit like an extreme VAD, it acts as a direct extension of vendors in target markets, providing everything required to create a flourishing reseller community and exploit end user opportunities, from pre-sales technical evaluations to ongoing support. This model has proved so successful that today Spectrami has more than 100 channel partners and revenues of about $60 million in the region. It is now hoping to replicate this success internationally with the opening of a UK office to develop business opportunities in the UK and Western Europe. It has assembled an experienced channel and cloud orchestration team and is already working with a number of vendor partners specialising in information security and cloud infrastructure, including Datera, Apstra, Peer Software, Enveil, AppView X, Authlogics and illapa. Technology Reseller spoke to Managing Director Sean Fane to find out more about Spectrami UK and its Vendor Extension Model. to the reseller community to help them be disruptive?’ And that is technologies that improve or dramatically save costs in the delivery of IT services. We are not very restrictive about what they are. That’s why our portfolio looks interesting and diverse. The common feature is that all the vendors do things in a way that drives more efficiency or saves significant costs. The example I give is of a new organisation we are working with called illapa. It has a bespoke interface called illapa Manage, which enables service providers, resellers or enterprises themselves to look at their environment and see where they are using private cloud or on-prem desktops and cost the delivery of services in each of those environments. They can compare the cost of AWS to Azure or Alibaba and work out that if they took their seven different workloads and put them all into the Alibaba cloud, they would save x amount of money. We have done this exercise with a couple of enterprises recently and it was mind-boggling how much they were able to save just by changing where workloads were hosted. With a click of a button, they could move them all to Alibaba or AWS or Azure and save £230,000 a month on their public cloud bill. That’s a fairly significant improvement in performance and cost. It’s that kind of approach to the delivery of IT services that gets Jason and I excited about working in this business and helping resellers take advantage of this changing landscape. TR : Do your vendor partners have existing distribution arrangements in place? SF: Out of the ones we have now and others that will be coming shortly, one has another distributor in the UK. Most are relatively new vendors to the UK. In some cases, they have started out with a country manager and an SE and have been working with enterprises and with two or three resellers in the UK and we are their first foray into a formalised two-tier infrastructure with a distributor that does some of that work for them. Q&A Continued.... There’s recently been a massive shift in the market from traditional silos, where you buy your storage here, your servers there, then your security product, then the desktop on top, to software vendors providing an as-a-service subscription model