Forward-thinking resellers have long wrapped services around infrastructure sales, but they’re no longer alone in the channel. Distributors are devising new added-value services to stamp their relevance on an increasingly virtualised channel.
Basic services, such as billing and drop-shipments, have long been part of a distributor’s arsenal, but they are no longer just a “post office and a bank”, says Alloys chief executive Paul Harman. True to its mantle as the ‘non-traditional distributor’, Alloys crafts bespoke solutions depending on an individual reseller’s needs, he adds.
Distribution Central is taking its own efforts further by providing pre-qualified sales leads, “not just marcomms”, says managing director Nick Verykios. He reckons distributors could do more to provide recurring revenue for their resellers.
Westcon Group sales director David Hook sees more opportunity for distributors to provide resellers with difficult services, such as information security “because there’s an easy way to prove the vulnerabilities and the fixes”.
While distributors climb the value chain, they’re at pains to say they’re no threat to resellers.
“This is complementary with existing business and not something that will compete,” says Jonathan Fox, general manager of Ingram Micro’s Advanced Solutions Group, of the distributor’s plans to value-add its services to resellers.
That goes doubly for distributor Rhipe, which last year acquired Microsoft partner nSynergy. “This was to make a service available to the channel,” says Rhipe chief commercial officer Warren Nolan. “When an opportunity comes to that business, we’ll look to incorporate a partner.”
Avnet Australia VP & GM Darren Adams says that although the IT channel is changing, distributors are still an “aggregation point”. Avnet provides infrastructure to free the reseller to manage the customer, he says. “We give resellers back time and that is the most valuable commodity.”
CRN has spoken to many of the biggest distributors in the Australian channel to compile this overview of the kinds of value-added services being provided. It is by no means an exhaustive list and many distributors have similar offerings, so talk to your preferred suppliers to understand how they can help.
DISTIE VOICES
- Alloys: Paul Harman, CEO
- Avnet: Darren Adams, VP & GM
- Bluechip Infotech: Johnson Hsiung, MD
- Dicker Data: Ben Johnson, GM marketing and strategy
- Distribution Central: Nick Verykios MD
- Hemisphere Technologies: Peter Phokos, MD
- Ingram Micro: Daniel Dainton, cloud senior regional manager; Jonathan Fox, GM Advanced Solutions Group
- Nextgen Distribution: John Walters, MD
- Rhipe: Warren Nolan, Chief commercial officer
- Synnex: Kee Ong, CEO
- Westcon: David Hook, Sales director
‘White label’ services to resell as your own
Cloud migration and onboarding
With last month’s launch of its Cloud Marketplace, Ingram Micro added its automated platform for Office 365 migrations using software tool SkyKick. Daniel Dainton, Ingram Micro Cloud senior regional manager for A/NZ, says its channel advice service also helps resellers select the best cloud service. “Technology doesn’t solve problems by itself; the customer support is a key component.”
Rhipe is also providing white label migration services to its reseller base of 1,500 active partners.
This follows the news in April that Microsoft Australia had named Ingram Micro and Rhipe as the first ‘two-tier’ Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs), allowing resellers to buy Office 365 from them as a monthly subscription.
Avnet offers cloud migration support through its infrastructure services. Avnet Services helps resellers design hybrid solutions on IBM’s SoftLayer, including scoping workloads, migration, hosting, tuning, support and content-delivery networks. Avnet’s Darren Adams says with migrations “from on-premise to hybrid or full-fledged public cloud, there’s a lot of work. You’re looking at process and procedures, billing, and provision requirements.”
Cloud portals and marketplaces
Avnet was one of the first to have a one-stop cloud shop in 2012 and has expanded its features since.
Many disties are now in the process of establishing these ‘app store’-esque ordering portals, which resellers can typically white-label as their own.
Ingram Micro used its IM Experience roadshow in June to announce it had gone live with its marketplace. It initially covers Microsoft cloud software, but there is scope to expand to a huge range of vendors (as it already does overseas).
Dicker Data is preparing its cloud portal this month. “It will allow our reseller partners to white-label our portal and provide a dedicated link to their end customers to manage their cloud commitments,” says Dicker Data’s Ben Johnson.
Distribution Central’s DC CloudSelect is a mature aggregator of 200 cloud providers for procurement, provisioning, integration billing and management. Verykios says the company is deep in research and development to expand the tools available, focusing on “revenue-increasing opportunities”.
Cloud will become an increasingly important offering from distributors as IT complexity grows, says Westcon Group sales director David Hook. “We will never build a [cloud] service so we’re not building a data centre,” Hook says of its ‘digital distribution’ strategy. “Our value is to provide a platform [to] distribute service providers’ services [be that] AWS, Microsoft or local service provider, a reseller or SI.”
Westcon acquired US cloud platform provider Verecloud last September. It currently offers Cisco and OfficeBox. “Resellers can come to Westcon, stand up a webstore, and provide cloud services to an end-user community as if they built those services themselves. Westcon can manage the billing and provisioning mechanism.”
Next: Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Darren Adams says Avnet offers back-of-house services to free the reseller up to tend to the customer. “We scale and leverage behind-the-scenes activities – and the partner can make a lot more money.”
Resellers also use Avnet’s infrastructure to augment their IT infrastructure: “Partners have wised-up to how they spend their money and they’re approaching us; why use your money when you can use someone else’s?”
By year’s end, Bluechip will have a cloud storage and infrastructure solution for its resellers, says managing director Johnson Hsiung. He says the pressure on resellers to refresh their infrastructure leads them to distributors. “We are working on it and it involves more than one vendor, so it takes a longer time.”
Bluechip is finding its way in this new world of distribution. “We need to do more than storage and computing; we’ll do more integration and also hand-hold the customer.”
Disaster recovery, backup and restore services
Powered by IBM’s Tivoli, Avnet provides disaster recovery for resale. “It’s a high-end capability, very secure, with a high-level SLA that includes compute, storage and software,” says Adams.
Avnet says its dedicated datacomms infrastructure and secure VPNs guarantee restore times: “We’re the telco wholesaler; we can expand the pipe as we need to on restore.”
‘Undercover’ integration
Ben Johnson says Dicker Data’s staff go undercover on demand. “Our services division will wear reseller partner uniforms when performing work at an end-customer’s site on behalf of that reseller.”
The ASX-listed distributor will also “consolidate items and provide configuration and integration services on behalf of partners, with all paperwork branded as the reseller”.
Most distributors offer asset tagging and prep work including staging to be resold. “Instead of doing backroom work, it allows their engineering resources to be on-site and visible,” says Avnet’s Adams.
Auditing and licensing
Rhipe started life as NewLease, auditing enterprise software. Warren Nolan says that DNA continues to run through the distributor. “That began when we were experts in licensing for hosting; other disties are only coming to the party now.”
Rhipe was Microsoft’s first pure-play licensing solutions provider, enabling it to sell enterprise agreements as well as service provider licences (SPLA).
Nextgen Distribution has partnered with Navicle to provide Oracle Licensing Optimisation Centre (OLOC). “It can be used as a service by resellers or we can find opportunities at the end-user level [to] bring back through the channel partner,” says Nextgen managing director John Walters. “This is a chunk of business that’s usually done direct.”
Consulting and pre-sales
Distributors provide validated IT architectures and advice to resellers. As part of this end-customer requirement gathering, Ben Johnson says Dicker Data staff “will wear partner uniforms and co-host meetings at end-customer sites to gather requirements and design solutions on behalf of the reseller”.
Synnex CEO Kee Ong says he is arming resellers with strategic line help by hiring business process solutions architects certified in areas such as storage and networking. They go to customer sites with the reseller to collect requirements and discuss business issues. “We need to understand what kind of solutions [the end-customer needs] at the configuration side so we can … always provide appropriate advice,” Ong says, adding that he encourages the architects to get down into the weeds of projects to help resellers deliver.
Demonstrating how Alloys crafts bespoke solutions, Paul Harman says it recently facilitated a printer rollout. “We helped [the reseller] with the demonstration and selecting the product. We wrote the product spec, finished off the product by doing the configuration and asset tagging, and shipped it for the reseller.”
Lifecycle management
Driven by corporate policies, many end-customers only buy hardware with a recycling plan. Ingram Micro’s Jonathan Fox says that “there’s a lot of
mileage in that”.
Ingram works with a certified third party to help resellers audit what’s coming off desks and out of racks. “We can do it, from taking it back to cleansing the data and destruction, refurbishing and buybacks.”
Helpdesk
Resellers scaling up might have too few technical support staff. Ingram Micro’s service desk is a 24/7 multilingual helpdesk for resale.
Ingram’s Daniel Dainton says its technical support “creates a customer for life”. It integrates with professional services automation systems such as Autotask and ConnectWise.
Training
Ingram Micro is bringing its US training services to Australia, starting with Microsoft and IBM products and services, says Fox.
“We’re looking at generic soft skills as well, like sales training.” Initial training in-class and online covers IBM storage, Power platform and software.
Next: Services designed to make your life easier
Services designed to make your life easier
Professional services network
Ingram Micro’s portal connects resellers by skills and geography, like a Google search, says Fox.
“You want to deploy a Cisco UCS solution in Dubbo but you have no presence or engineer skills. You type in the skillset, where you want it, and it will list partners to fulfill that requirement.”
Cloud billing
Avnet has a cross-cloud billing engine to simplify end-customer billing. Avnet’s Darren Adams says it works across Azure, AWS and even a reseller’s own infrastructure (using APIs). “It’s complex to bill and aggregate multi-platform; now it’s a fairly straightforward customisation. Every partner I speak to, they’re desperate for a toolkit.”
Marketing
Nextgen has gone further than most distributors, buying digital marketing agency, Bang. “That’s about driving new technology and especially a digital approach,” says Nextgen managing director John Walters. “How do we take that vendor to market and drive marketing campaigns that end in lead-gen campaigns and bring that back through the channel?”
Alloys opens its showrooms to resellers to use as their own, with their own branding displayed on digital signs. Paul Harman says that as online channels dominate, showrooms become more important: “There could be situations where a reseller hasn’t seen or touched a product.”
Alloys also writes up its resellers’ case studies to use in their own content marketing.
Distribution Central sends proposals to resellers to pass to their customers based on what it knows about the end customer. Nick Verykios says: “The reseller takes that bill of materials and refines it. The bit we give is otherwise a massive cost to them.”
Rhipe’s novel approach to marketing includes analyst-in-residence, Stephen Parker. The distie loans out Parker to resellers to keynote their events and consult to clients. Parker also runs business transformation workshops.
Flexible finance
Security-focused distributor Hemisphere helps its resellers when the clients are asking for payment arrangements that the vendor doesn’t offer.
Managing director Peter Phokos says that if a security vendor doesn’t offer a five-year opex-style arrangement, “we might be adding value to our partners by financing the term over the five years”.
“We can do it on a subscription basis, which then in turn doesn’t cripple the cash flow of our partners.”
Breakout: What resellers want from value-added distribution
Before he came to Australia, Levitar director Bryce Jamie spent 12 years as a senior network engineer at Paramount Pictures in the US.
When he was there, digital filmmaking was starting to take over Hollywood and the need for good backup and recovery was felt (in 1999, Pixar nearly lost critical parts of Toy Story 2 due to backup failure). So it’s little surprise that Jamie is a big fan of cloud disaster recovery.
“[Levitar] had a backup-as-a-service in 2007, so when Avnet came out with it, we thought we could leverage it,” Jamie says. Levitar maintains its heritage front end while adding customers to Avnet’s infrastructure. “Eventually we’ll phase out our own infrastructure.”
Avnet’s helpdesk also augments Levitar’s. “Anything services-based, we do with Avnet,” Jamie says (although he is also an Ingram Micro partner). That extends to tapping Avnet’s implementation services, which he says is “liberating” especially for projects that need rare, specialist skills. “We have in-house staff for some stuff but... it’s more cost effective to use Avnet skills.”
He says “more stuff is being pushed over to distributors” and would like to see distributors take on more end-point management and security.
James Scremin might concur. He is in the unique position as a reseller and retail property developer in Griffith with a strong point-of-sale practice. Scremin, founder of Flexible Solutions, resells ShadowProtect backup service from StorageCraft but is interested in an offering to come from distributor Bluechip Infotech later this year.
“It’s appealing because of the scale; they [Bluechip] can offer enterprise scale at a cost-effective price,” Scremin says.
He would like to see distributors offer telco services, especially mobile access for internet-of-things solutions. “If a distributor could get that solved they could negotiate with Telstra and build a piece of the solution that we can [resell].”
A data communications service that resellers could bundle would help Scremin’s side business; he developed the new Wangaratta Co-Store where Target is an anchor tenant. And he’s developing managed services solutions for retailers.
“We started out with accounting information systems and moved to IT infrastructure and also property development. I’m talking to national retailers [about] creating an integrated solution.”
Summary: What distributors offer
Alloys: Helpdesk; content marketing; showroom; streamlined administration and RA; consulting, integration and pre-sales engineering including configuration and delivery (eg, asset tagging).
Avnet: Infrastructure and application support services; cloud hosting and migration services; back-end support services such as MDM and end-point management, asset tagging and readying equipment for customer shipment.
Bluechip Infotech: Investigating bundled infrastructure solutions; easy RAs; flexible terms; personal service.
Dicker Data: Gathering end-customer requirements; cloud portal; consolidation and configuration services; drop-shipments; on-site deployment and installation.
Distribution Central: DC CloudSelect marketplace; presales support; demo kit; tagging and asset management (project delivery); architectural design; outsourced procurement and brokerage; marketing communications.
Ingram Micro: Cloud Marketplace including: Cloud Ignite Services (migration and on-boarding); Service Desk; and Cloud Elevate (loyalty). Office 365+SkyKick Exchange to cloud migration. Professional services portal, training and IT lifecycle management.
Nextgen Distribution: Nextgen Create agency for lead-generation and marketing; and Oracle software asset management.
Rhipe: Analyst in residence; business transformation workshops; licensing; marketing; cloud billing; systems integration; helpdesk.
Synnex: Business process architects; e-portal; training centres (in Melbourne and Sydney); sales enablement; flexible terms; rapid logistics (including warehouses in Brisbane and Perth).
Westcon: Cloud ‘digital distribution’ platform; staging; preconfiguration; implementation; asset tagging; vendor-certified technical support; marketing and financial services.
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