technologyreseller.co.uk 15 NEWS : RESELLERS they move to an adjacent business. A lot of partners need to widen the profile of how they do business and we can support them in that. That’s a big priority for us.” Watts points out that it is also a priority for more and more Tech Data customers. “There are around 10,000 trading resellers in the UK in any given month. They’re not the same resellers trading every month, so there’ll be a higher number overall, but there's about 10,000 resellers trading in the UK every month. A couple of thousand of those went very quiet during the pandemic – consulting businesses, small businesses that were servicing what was in place and didn't need to buy anything more for their customers. They’re all back. “And there is a renewed urgency among some of those partners to move into understanding adjacent technologies. It may be if you were very much accredited to sell hardware, storage, networking, server technology, you would have moved some of that strategy very fast to the cloud during the pandemic. And now you probably need to ensure your salesforce and your technical team really understand those technologies. “If you weren’t selling a lot of security before, or maybe you were but it was just device-based security to secure people working from home, you may need to secure that on-premise position better now that workers are back, and maybe your teams aren’t accredited to do that. So we are seeing a lot of people coming through our education programmes on those sorts of topics and technologies.” ESG Over and above these technology-related trends, Watts says the topics that always come up in conversations with peers, vendors and customers, aside from the skills shortage, are sustainability and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). “Everyone is fast wising up to the fact that their businesses and the supply chains they work in need to be moving towards net zero carbon aims very quickly. The government wants it. Everyone’s partners want it; if you want to carry on supplying partners, at some point continued...
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