A winning formula for reselling mega-vendors

Microsoft calls its channel partner, LeetGeek, “those Apple Guys”. The label has some justification, confesses the service provider’s director, Ben Corbett.

But that doesn’t stop the Adelaide reseller advocating a non-Apple solution.

“We’ve got the most [Apple Certified Macintosh Technicians] in the state,” Corbett says. “When the Apple Store opened in town, the first two people queued up were wearing LeetGeek shirts.” (They were LeetGeek staff.)

LeetGeek’s philosophy that modern IT systems need experts versed in all facets of their construction, maintenance and migration – irrespective of vendor or affiliation – is catching fire with Australian resellers. And it betrays the shift in allegiances that causes Apple experts to advocate Microsoft Small Business Servers, or Microsoft cloud resellers also to offer Google Apps.

In its most recent vendor analysis, Gartner saw disruptors Google and Amazon Web Services becoming more influential over the next 10 years at the expense of Apple and Microsoft. Indicative of industry flux, CIOs told Gartner the most influential vendor category was “Other/To be determined”. 

“We’re very much about heterogeneous environments and agnostic solutions; we do a helluva lot of Microsoft stuff as well,” Corbett says.

Corbett laid down the law to Apple when it opened its company shop last May in the heart of Adelaide’s Rundle Mall, three kilometres from LeetGeek’s offices in the fashionable inner east suburb of Norwood. 

“We work pretty closely with the Apple Store and they send a lot of referrals our way, but I was cautious about how that relationship was going to work. I said to the [business development manager], if you pass me a referral and I don’t think Apple is the right choice, I’m not going to push it even if it’s from you – and that was what he said he wanted to hear. 

“He said, ‘If the customer winds up with a solution that isn’t appropriate they will be unhappy and that’s a negative association with our brand’. And I said, ‘Wow! That’s so awesome’. That’s how it should be.

“It shouldn’t be we have to shift a certain amount of tin, no matter what. We’re not going to sell a product just because we get a free holiday out of it.”

As a trusted adviser, LeetGeek sometimes tells customers home truths. This happened with a financial services client who allowed his Mac fandom to obscure IT infrastructure for his new business.

“It was what he was used to, so when he set up his business he said he wanted Macs. He went to a Mac supplier and asked, can you give me a computer and servers for my business?”

But it turned out Windows was needed to run a critical software application across the business. The earlier Apple reseller had crafted a solution that overlaid Parallels virtual machine to enable Windows.

“Before you jump into a sale, you have to do your due diligence,” Corbett says.

“Trying to install Windows inside that – it’s clunky and a pain. It didn’t make sense to maintain it if it wasn’t necessary.”

Instead, Corbett and co decided to “scrap OS X and install Windows native” with Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 for the back end.

In education, it’s the opposite. “When we started out – and this is why Microsoft thinks we’re an Apple shop – [most] of our clients were looking for Apple devices,” says Corbett. That’s still the case.

“Whereas the backend infrastructure may be a mix of Windows and OS X, a lot of the client devices would be iPads or MacBooks.” 

Keeping abreast of so many competing technologies requires vendors and distributors to share their roadmaps and provide evaluation equipment and services on fair terms, Corbett says.

“You have to cut through the marketing and get figures and real-world examples before you invest your time. We have to be confident with the product before we’ll roll with it. [Evaluation equipment] makes a huge difference. It’s a pretty hard sell if someone won’t let us play with the stuff.”

Next: A foot in both camps