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.
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