How Australian disties are diversifying

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.