Fujitsu is one of two CRN MVPs that is both a solutions provider and a vendor (along with NEC). Nevertheless, the company still goes through all the trials and tribulations of any other channel partner in its relationships with suppliers.
“Honesty from the vendor and consistency from the vendor are hugely important,” said Fujitsu ANZ vice president for platforms Alistair Latham. “I have personally tried, through [Fujitsu channel manager] Daniel Campbell and others, to instill this in the way we engage with our channel.”
Latham told CRN that although Fujitsu - as a vendor - has its own products, the services arm independently judges which supplier is best for the customer’s solution.
“It’s quite key in our offering… that we are able to offer best of breed where appropriate and not always something with a Fujitsu badge on the front,” he said. “Being able to offer, and have partners with, other vendors is vital.”
Maintaining top-level vendor accreditations takes a significant amount of effort and resources for Fujitsu.
“[The commitment] is substantial. It’s huge. It’s untenable, in fact,” said Latham. “The big challenge as a business is that I can have my pre-sales people in [vendor] training, pretty much 100 percent of the time. They always want to know the newest and latest thing, so they quite enjoy the training - especially when most of it’s done in Las Vegas or San Francisco.”
MVP vendor partnerships
- Cisco Gold Certified Partner
- EMC Gold
- HP Platinum/Gold
- IBM Premier Business Partner
- Microsoft Gold
- VMware Premier
Notes on methodology
The CRN MVP program recognises Australia's top IT providers by measuring their value and versatility based on third-party vendor accreditations across 12 eligible vendors: Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, HP (incl Aruba), IBM, Intel (incl McAfee), Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware.
Only eligible vendors listed above. Only Gold-equivalent partner levels are included. CRN MVP companies may have accreditations with other, ineligible vendor programs or lower-level accreditations with eligible vendors (for example, we do not list silver accreditations).
We expect the list of eligible vendors to change in coming years, which may open up the CRN MVP program to new entrants.
For further information on the CRN MVP program, see this article.
We are currently accepting expressions of interest for the 2016 CRN MVPs at www.techpartner.news/MVP. Entries will open in coming months.
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