Technology Reseller - v16

01732 759725 Q&A 34 SF: If you think about the way we consume stuff, from mobile phones to cars; we don’t buy them anymore, we pay per month to use them for a certain period and then hand them back or get a new one. We do the same with subscriptions to FT.com . Dropbox and all the other things we use. The enterprise world would like to do the same. Yet the channel of resellers and most incumbent distributors are heavily motivated by their vendors to sell renewals of the same stuff they bought before. It’s not uncommon for a reseller that has been in business for 10 years to have built quite a successful business and their job is to make sure that when a customer renews their storage, they renew it with some more HP or IBM storage and when they renew their servers, they renew with some more servers. Margins are diminishing and the ownership of customers is diminishing, as they increasingly buy software as a service directly from vendors. The challenge resellers face is a) how to get greater customer ownership and show incredible value to these customers so that they value their relationship with them; and b) how to get ownership of selling them a new infrastructure that delivers a 50% improvement in performance for 50% of the price, whilst capitalising on some of the cloud-based services they want to buy and proving they are the organisation that can do that for them. It’s really important that instead of resellers just saying ‘We have got a cloud service we deliver from AWS’ or ‘We’ve got our own cloud platform that we have developed, would you like to rent a bit TR : How big is Spectrami’s UK team? SF: There are six or seven of us now and we plan to hire another 10 within the next 12 months. We won’t be hiring people who are new to this type of work. Will Brooks I had as my sales director at IQ-Sys for 10 years; he’s extremely experienced in helping resellers go to market with technically complex products. Grant Tiller was the country manager for RES, which was recently acquired by Avanti; he’s worked in the channel for the last 20 years. These are experienced, seasoned technical sales professionals. And we’ve got two very high-end technical people who deal with the complicated stuff that goes on behind the desktop, in delivering services and understanding how technologies work. There are resources for our group function over in the Middle East, but the people we put in territory here are to support partners and to drive business. TR : What do you see as the big challenges facing resellers today and how is Spectrami UK helping to address them? ...continued European businesses increase investment on security measures Revenues from enterprise security products sold by Western European IT distributors in the first ten months of 2018 were +10.1% higher than over the same period last year, according to the latest data published by CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company. The UK saw a 21.6% increase in revenue. This growth was seen in revenues from hardware and software designed for large enterprise customers, products aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and others that may be used by either segment. For this analysis, products are grouped under three broad headings: data protection and recovery (which includes standalone and cloud offerings); endpoint security; and enterprise network security, which primarily consists of hardware, but also includes related software products and expansion modules. There was growth across all three areas, with the greatest increase, of +61.7% year-on-year, for data protection and recovery products due to its smaller base. Growth had the biggest impact in end-point security products, which saw a year-on-year revenue growth of +11.3%, and there was revenue growth for many other products in this category, including security suites. Mathias Knöfel, Enterprise Analyst at CONTEXT, said: “These generate the largest share of end-point security revenue and there has been growth across Western Europe for standalone and cloud offerings from companies such as Trend Micro, Symantec and Check Point, to name but a few. Other product segments in this area that saw growth included internet security, mobile security and control management.” In enterprise network security, which saw revenues increase by +5.5%, there was growth for security appliances, such as Check Point’s 15600 Next Generation Threat Prevention, Cisco’s Firepower and Trend Micro Deep Discovery and TippingPoint products. Revenue from the software required for both standalone and cloud offerings in this area is becoming increasingly important. However, revenues from products such as firewall and gateway appliances declined over the year. www.contextworld.com MARKET SNAPSHOT CONTEXT of space?’ that they actually own those customers in terms of being cloud advisors on which infrastructure they should build themselves; which they should put into public; how they can manage the transition between the two; all the other services around managing and optimising the sprawl that comes with users provisioning applications themselves and storing things in their own personal Dropbox folders; and all the other enterprise-related issues that having this kind of access to services creates. There’s a great opportunity in saying ‘You can get back control of that and improve your performance by delivering your infrastructure through these new technology vendors’. That’s really what we are about: look at these vendors; they are going to help you help your enterprise customers take back control of their environment, whilst also providing the flexibility to enable them to expand successfully; and you are going to become this trusted third party that has great services revenue, that has recurring business from them, and that is delivering the innovative infrastructure tools they need for this next generation of IT. We really want to get resellers that are focused on the enterprise; that are hungry for new business; that want to be an innovator and disrupter in their customers’ world; and that say ‘We are not just going to sell you the same stuff again. We are going to show you how to do things better, faster, cheaper’. That’s what excites us, and we hope we will be able to find a subset of resellers that are really interested in that message. www.spectrami.co.uk Margins are diminishing and the ownership of customers is diminishing, as they increasingly buy software as a service directly from vendors