Meet the CRN MVPs: Data#3

As a publicly listed company on the Australian Securities Exchange, the 1,100-staff Data#3 has a lot of stakeholders – shareholders, the board, employees and customers.

Add vendors to that list, says chief executive Laurence Baynham.

Technology vendors hold a special place for Data#3 and accreditations are the ties that bind these relationships. Data#3 has the broadest range of gold partnerships of any of the 2015 CRN MVPs but don’t call it vendor-agnostic. The company celebrates the vital role its vendor partners play in the business.

“Over many years we have grown our business with the vendors. We see a direct correlation where if we invest smartly with the vendor we will get a return and the vendor will as well. We make a very deliberate play of working with vendors of having multiple vendor teams – our vendor management team and dedicated people working with individual vendors.

“An alternative to this would be to consider ourselves ‘vendor-independent’ which would push the value of the vendor further down the stack. Playing on our vendor independence would be easy to do in some respects but that is not our background. Part of our DNA is working jointly with vendors and going jointly with them to customers as an extension of the vendor,” says Baynham.

Baynham avoids singling out any of its vendors as more important than others (though he has in the past identified Microsoft as a particular key to its performance; Data#3 being a major licensing partner). The reseller has built strong practices around vendors such as Microsoft Cisco and VMware as well as around services practices such as its new security division.

With so many certifications to uphold, Data#3 doesn’t just invest millions in its partner levels it spends “multi multi-millions” says Baynham. This demands careful attention on return on investment. ROI “needs not be a more significant return than if we invested in something else”.

“That is why over the years with some of our major strategic vendors we have invested more one year than in another or we have pulled back on a vendor because we don’t see the ROI. It has less to do with the technology and more the certainty of ROI,” says Baynham.

Overall Baynham says that “increasingly the vendors are listening” to their reseller partners. It helps when you’re a company of Data#3’s scale; it turned over $870.5 million in the most recent financial year. As a member of various advisory boards for vendors it can influence vendor policy.

“We have one global partner who had a very complex channel program in terms of rebates. On the advisory board we asked for more simplicity which meant that if we sold X we would get Y in return as a rebate. Over two to three advisory boards changes were made. Was it [only] because of the advisory board? I don’t think so but it probably had an influence.”

MVP vendor partnerships

• Cisco Gold Certified Partner
• Citrix Solution Advisor Platinum
• EMC Gold
• IBM Premier Business Partner
• Intel Security Gold
• Lenovo Diamond
• Symantec Platinum
• VMware Premier
• Microsoft Gold
• HP Platinum/Gold

Notes on methodology

The CRN MVP program recognises Australia's top IT providers by measuring their value and versatility based on third-party vendor accreditations across 12 eligible vendors: Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, HP (incl Aruba), IBM, Intel (incl McAfee), Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware. 

Only eligible vendors listed above. Only Gold-equivalent partner levels are included. CRN MVP companies may have accreditations with other, ineligible vendor programs or lower-level accreditations with eligible vendors (for example, we do not list silver accreditations). 

We expect the list of eligible vendors to change in coming years, which may open up the CRN MVP program to new entrants.

For further information on the CRN MVP program, see this article.

We are currently accepting expressions of interest for the 2016 CRN MVPs at www.techpartner.news/MVP. Entries will open in coming months.