While vendor-agnostic certifications might take a back seat for resellers who have built their business around particular key vendors, Australia may be set to follow the US trend in which cross-vendor solutions are changing not only the IT landscape but also how resellers obtain training.
Data#3’s Grant is one managing director who preaches vendor loyalty, but is also looking to a future in which vendors themselves start to overlap their technology with other manufacturers.
While software companies such as SAP had been using Microsoft platforms for a long
time, Grant believes that hardware vendors doing the same thing is an emerging trend. He points to work being done by IBM and Cisco on telephony as it applies to mobile workers as an example.
"We’re very mindful to follow cross-vendor solutions being provided by the vendors we’ve identified as key to us. Our next phase is to work with solutions that incorporate multiples of those vendors," Grant says.
Similarly, Leading Solutions has diversified from its original business of focusing solely on HP, says Leading’s national service and support manager Rex Galley. "In the last 12 months we have broadened the hardware offering to include both Toshiba and Acer products.
"Each of the vendors have their own specific training regimens; however, hardware vendors in general have tended to relax the requirements and recognise that each vendor also has a lot
of commonality in their technical training and therefore are more prone to make exemptions possible."
This cross-vendor recognition is a new and welcome development, says Galley. "In the past each vendor took a very narrow focus on their own training for certifications.
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