Opinion: For resellers, the woes are similar everywhere

I'm sitting 10,972 metres above the Republic of Malta on my way from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on the first part of a world speaking tour.

I love watching the small screen which tracks our flight progress with figures and pictures - I'm sure it's there just for geeks like myself.

The world looks so small on these screens and it was with this thought that I started contemplating what I had learned from my time in South Africa about the state of IT there.

The more I travel and  talk to resellers from different parts of the world, the more I realise how small the world is, as most of us are faced with similar issues and we often have similar experiences.

Looking at the small map it dawns on me IT has no borders and knows no boundaries. The stories the resellers told me in South Africa are the same as the stories people tell me all over the world.

They are struggling with their superior service proposition in the face of decreased pricing strategies from huge whitegoods retailers.

They struggle with the value proposition to clients who, in these tough economic times, are convinced they need to cut back their spending.

They are struggling with the transition of their businesses from  retail to a service-focused model. I could well have been speaking with resellers from any city in Australia.

There were a couple of regional differences though. The first  was their poor communications infrastructure.

Despite spending all my time in Johannesburg and Cape Town, my BlackBerry would continually struggle to find 3G providers.

Cape Town is only 19 percent smaller than Sydney and Johannesburg is 2.4 times larger than Sydney, so I expected mobile reception to be much better than it was.

If I was disappointed by mobile services, I was more surprised than disappointed with their internet infrastructure.