A winning formula for reselling mega-vendors

Platform migration

Source Central Partners is another reseller finding it more fruitful to walk both sides of the street, says chief executive officer Brendan Redpath.

“We were a traditional reseller until we recently saw an opportunity to work with Google,” Redpath says.

Moving to cloud services allowed Redpath’s customers to cut physical infrastructure and invest in networks, especially wireless, he says. This is reflected in the vendor relationship he says is strongest – with wireless network maker Xirrus.

But that hasn’t stopped the Melbourne solutions provider collaborating with Cisco, another strong partnership mediated through distributors: “We’re making the distribution channel work for us because  they know how to play the game with vendors better than we do.”

Source Central Partners rounds out its key vendors with Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and Apple while recently pursuing HP directly, “but we try to stay reasonably agnostic”, he says.

Further compounding this approach was Source Central’s March acquisition of a small start-up that specialises in Juniper. “It can make us more attractive to clients who are looking for a relatively agnostic approach. It gives us  the opportunity to supply a different solution if required. Or it allows us to work with clients who already have Juniper in their network,” says Redpath.

When it comes to “unravelling the mystery of Microsoft licencing”, Synnex has emerged as a trusted adviser. 

“I have enough grey hairs managing it,” Redpath says. “[Synnex] takes the responsibility of understanding the opportunity and what the client has and comes back to us with a solution.”

In schools, Apple will hold the upper hand over Microsoft and Google for at least two years. “That discussion is a no-brainer – iPad absolutely dominates that space. There are those [schools] who want to have a chat about Windows and Android but it always rolls back to iPad.”

And on notebooks, “it’s all gone MacBook Air”, he says. But devices such as Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Carbon, a lightweight Windows contender, are making headway.

Shifting customer expectations and rapid innovation means Google is a contender, especially where budgets are tight. 

“Chromebooks are starting to get more traction [but] we say, ‘Hang on you’re not even on Google’.”

This is where it may be necessary to switch a customer’s infrastructure.

“If they’re running on Exchange and proprietary applications, it won’t work. [Chromebooks] are fast and quite good for what they’re intended but they have to be in the Google ecosystem – Drive, Docs, Gmail.”

Redpath cautions a staged approach with plenty of time to iron out crimps.

“Pilot, pilot and pilot. When you’re making such a fundamental shift for a client you don’t roll out without piloting. We had a client we migrated from a pure Microsoft platform to Apple and Google. The expectation is it will be seamless but we did a pilot and found a bucketload of issues.”

Training for new user interfaces is a major pitfall of any migration, he says.

“So it’s going from Outlook to Gmail and how users are going to take that. And addressing that finite detail because you’re making a complete shift.”

Gartner analyst Brian Prentice backs Corbett’s and Redpath’s approach. 

“It’s a mistake at the moment to try to pick a winner,” Prentice says.

“It’s not about throwing all our chips on Apple or Google [because] we’re living in a heterogeneous platform environment. This is not an issue enterprises are particularly comfortable with.”

Prentice says Apple is in the lead in mobile, with Google second but Microsoft is “struggling to get their message to resonate”.

“Microsoft has not really made a dent in the mobile market of any appreciable size.”

A factor resellers should consider when presenting solutions is that CIOs still harbour a “negative bias to Apple”, he says.

“Apple is not geared to being an enterprise company. CIOs would prefer to have vendors who will share their product plans for the next 12 months so they can make decisions. Apple’s model requires secrecy up to the launch.”

And although enterprises are warming to Google Apps, owing to its security flaws and Google’s business model, Android is off the table.

“Enterprises still have substantial issues with Android. There are security issues that Google has not addressed. Apple and Microsoft are much safer from a security perspective,” says Prentice.

Next: A wave of uncertainty