16 01732 759725 “An interesting dynamic for us to watch is, now that the PC vendors have mostly cleared those massive backlogs of inventory, what are they saying to their factories? If they get that wrong again, we could be back in supply constraint because we’ve been clearing all that inventory out and there’s no back-up. Are the manufacturers going to go back to business as usual and tell the factory, six months or 12 months in advance, to WORKPLACE continued... Tea Point do whatever they have to do to get the components and suddenly we're in glut again? Or will they say we’re not going to do that again so suddenly we're in shortage? No one knows what the natural beat rate is.” Another area of uncertainty is persistently high inflation and rising interest rates and the impact they could have on business confidence and growth. “There's a generation of IT business leaders who have been brought up with borrowing costs being insignificant. And suddenly it's got a real cost. Are they still feeling bold about borrowing, leveraging, which is after all how a lot of businesses are built, or do they feel more cautious because they've never been in this climate before? And is that holding us back?” Despite these economic concerns, political instability and the failure of Brexit to deliver any advantage, Watts remains confident, not least because customers face the same challenges as they did before, such as the need to secure their estates, to manage big data, to choose a cloud or hybrid model. “I think the market for devices will normalise later this year and the high growth technology areas – cloud, IoT, analytics, security – will continue to drive good growth. Within that, the whole question of ‘Do I go cloud, hybrid, as a service’, with things like HPE GreenLake, Dell APEX and Lenovo TruScale, and of managing data from a hybrid perspective will drive good market change.” He adds that while distributors can’t make the market there is a lot that they can do to help customers overcome the challenges they face. “Roughly speaking, I've got 80 large customers and I've got 8,000 smaller customers, and there's a tonne of stuff that we can do with tooling, education, transformation and business development to support a partner or help them move into an adjacent market, into cloud or IoT. Most of those things are aimed at growing their business, but sometimes it might be about saving them money by supporting them through transactions or making them move faster than their competitors. The newer the technology, the more complex the technology or the more a solution needs to be aggregated, the more value we can add.” One license, all features: The simplest license structure in the channel
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