Riders on the storm

Through nearly two hours of debate and reflection, CRN's editorial advisory panel of resellers, distributors and vendors discussed the technologies, market strategies and business tactics that smart resellers need to understand to survive and thrive in the year ahead.

What follows is an edited transcript that no reseller who wants to stay in business into 2010 can afford to miss.

CRN: What technologies are selling well right now? Wireless seems to be doing well, but is that the case across the board?

Wayne Small: The work we do is in the smaller end of the small business space. To me that's up to about 1000 users, and 80 percent of our customers are 100 users or less. With that framework we are not seeing a lot of take up in wireless. The two areas we are seeing take up is VoIP phone systems and virtualisation.

Virtualisation to me is the biggest hot button that can assist businesses in saving quite a bit of money as they go through deploying infrastructure and so forth. They can build up in preparation for when things start to return without investing heavily in that infrastructure.

Gerard Florian: From our point of view, we are going through phase two, phase three on the wireless side. We are getting some "verticalisation" so things like education - putting in wireless across the campus - healthcare. Wireless for data is one thing. Wireless for voice means a whole different level of coverage and quality of service. Black spots around the lift may be OK for data coverage but if I'm doing voice and I want to walk from one floor to another I need to have that saturation coverage. It's taking it to the next level.

Ross Cochrane: Generally it's about collaboration. It amazes me there are so many people with notebooks still. If you are selling security and collaboration why would you have people with notebooks? Because they are not backed up there are loss-prevention issues and you are not working towards collaboration because everyone's got their own data. We are seeing a lot of focus on how every business needs to lift the level of communication.

If you used to have to tell your team how you were going once a quarter, now you have to tell them every month. You have got to be nimble, agile, change your strategy.

We are seeing people really start to look at conferencing using Webex, OCS or whatever the technology they choose. Rather than setting up just a physical meeting the meeting will be both physical and as however many can attend remotely. You want flexibility in your staff, and you want them to work four days [but] you still want them to be able to collaborate.

There is no more saving anything on the C drive. It has to go on the network and be available in a team environment. We are seeing a lot of drivers for network infrastructure being driven by UC and video conferencing. Voice is just another application. It meets certain attributes to the network. We are seeing a lot of network infrastructure being deployed because people see the benefits and productivity.

Paul Voges: Customers have more remote workers, casual staff, trying to cut costs at the moment. The things customers will save money on is UC, collaboration, mobile online access to information they never had before. Business intelligence, be it for a mobile device or notebook.

Dealing with security issues for casual staff. For example, if you had a casual workforce with laptops and say you were a construction company, and people are being hired for a project for an amount of time, the data security that comes with that.

If you look at the investments that customers make, virtualisation then features into that. As you get more flexible with your workforce and your business operation you start thinking about where does data need to reside, where do you access applications from?

And with that you start looking at cloud computing or software plus services and saying what applications have to be hosted within the company, and which applications can be hosted on the internet?

That's why you might be hearing about wireless because it's a broader symptom of a more flexible work environment. I don't see it as a wireless play as much as customers needing to be agile and flexible.

CRN: The network itself seems to be stepping forward. Network optimisation, performance optimisation is a really interesting area because it is not something the customer will necessarily go out and ask for.

Wendy O'Keeffe: You'd think that that technology would be screaming, and that's my prediction. But in some cases it is and in some cases it's not. When we are putting in [honey] pots we have probably got an 85 percent stick rate in those situations and so it's a typical puppy dog sale which works very well [customers who try before they buy end up buying the product]. Most of us around the table were here in 2000-01 when there were some issues with the economy and the market, and those optimisation technologies were phenomenal.

And my expectation would be that that would happen again. But some of the vendors that we represent are finding it really tough.

CRN: Is there any reason why some network optimisation vendors do better than others?

Wendy O'Keeffe: I think it's a highly contested market and there is a lot of different models to market.

Maree Lowe: I think Ross's comment about collaboration, it's actually driving the customer again while all these infrastructure changes are happening. We either look for products as a distributor or as an integrator. They're different roles but you can see education as a customer nationally is driving very much towards collaboration and what they call connected learner communities - local, state and global communities. Within that you now have the technology changes with the netbooks, development of software portals, the building infrastructure that's going to happen in all the schools, which will bring a lot of other infrastructure behind it. Or again hearing the strategy of the customer. Collaboration in schools is more the concept of the community. How do we access information everywhere. It's a different take on the sort of technology going in.

CRN: What impact will the NBN have on your businesses?

David Henderson: There are 6000 resellers out there who have got to start thinking about that. Whether or not they become an aggregator . . . but they better do something about it because it is going to change. The environment is going to change, virtualisation is absolutely fantastic because of the RoI for the customer - it's not a debate, it's an obvious economic driver for any business.
Anywhere up to 60 percent of our business is being driven by virtualisation.

CRN: Looking at issues that derive from the proposed $43 billion National Broadband Network, Microsoft chose not to go with Telstra's T-Suite for its Office product.

The NBN makes cloud computing more feasible, so where does a vendor such as Microsoft see cloud computing headed and how can resellers get on board?

Paul Voges: From Microsoft's strategy we see three models coming out for cloud computing - there'll be Microsoft online, which will be with Telstra, but there will be partner-hosted solutions as well. We see a very strong model with our partner channel.

And if I look at our hosted solutions, whether it's Exchange or Sharepoint or (Dynamic) customer relationship management with our existing partner base, [it] is one of our fastest growing portfolios and we see that continuing.

And then the third model is on-premise. Any network infrastructure that allows people to transport data across networks quicker makes our technology play easier because our investments are around collaboration and delivering more services over the web across a range of devices so I don't see it having a negative impact.
 
Ross Cochrane: With regard to the NBN, anything that's pumping $43 billion into building a network won't be built so we can do email faster. We're going to do different things.

This is the massive opportunity for our industry is to say, OK, what are those things that we're going to do with that high-speed network? It's an opportunity not just for our industry but the whole country. It's a great endorsement for technology to say it is a major component of our society and we need to take advantage as IT leaders to say, OK, this investment is going to be made so how do we make the most out of it?

And everyone's got a role to play: vendors provide a lot of great technologies but a lot of resellers, regional [or otherwise], have to find ways to take that network to say how do I use that investment to make a better environment whether it's in education or health or local community or whatever.
 
Paul Voges: I see it as an enabler; not a change of strategy it just makes things that we've been talking about for years possible. If you look at the size of data shared around the country today versus 10 years ago you think what may be possible in two to five years' time. It will be a very positive thing for all of us.
 
Gerard  Florian: Until you take time to understand what someone in a hospital or an education environment goes through [you can't capitalise on the] vertical [markets]. From a partner point of view, the ability to understand what some of the smaller players in the channel come together to solve [niche applications]. The challenge here is to understand the opportunities and build a slightly different market.
 
John Walters: I've talked to quite a few regional resellers over the past couple of weeks since the announcement and it will be interesting to see what regional resellers do compared to what they do now. Regional resellers tend to do more things to more people than getting down to specifics.

You look at what Mathew Dickerson does in Dubbo because you can't be too specific in Dubbo but at the end of the day what do they do with their model to capture the opportunity? Do they stay a supplier of product and put some services around?

Will they have a role to play in delivering some of the regional product in the core network? Chances are, maybe not; maybe the big players will get most of that. So how do they adapt their business model to get the opportunity? A lot of it will be driven by content and how do they adapt to that?

So there's going to be some quite deep thinking for some of those mid to smaller tier resellers of how they can take advantage of this and a lot of those guys are flat out working in the business and they haven't got time - outside those real entrepreneurs - to think about how to work on the business. So will that wave wash over them?
 
Paul Voges: We've put resources on our partner website to help the resellers work out how to change their business model and how to make money out of (cloud computing).
 
Maree Lowe: We were in the middle of a demonstration of electronic whiteboards between a head office and branch office but what came out of that was a videoconferencing solution. You typically thought videoconferencing in the SMB market four years ago was out of the question. And now there's very much a solution there. But that' the problem for the reseller - you now have the ability to conference, to have your training and save on travel.
 
CRN: Windows 7 is seen as a big driver by some but some hardware vendors say it will have little impact on their business. What expectations do resellers expect Windows 7 to have on the market?

Wayne Small: I'm surprised that people would say that Windows 7 wouldn't have an impact. From a reseller perspective, a lot of resellers are saying don't go to Vista because of all the bad press and resellers at the smaller end of town are shying away from Vista.

Every single reseller I've spoken to who is shying away from Vista are saying go to Windows 7 as soon as it comes out because they see Windows 7 as what Vista should have been. I'm blown away by how much more efficient, how much faster the machines are (under Windows 7).

I really think Win7 will help us move along quite a bit more in terms of growth as a business and people who have held off moving to Vista will [not] have a problem moving to Win7.

When they can start to see the productivity improvements they can get out of Win7 versus XP - when you tie it in with Server 08 R2 - is huge. Aside from performance, the remote connectivity in Win7 will make life so much easier.
 
Gerard Florian: A simple thing we take for granted is you want to use your laptop in multiple places and go to five or six meetings during the day, the powering up and down process has not been as efficient as it should have been (in Vista and XP) whereas in Windows 7 it's instant.
 
Paul Voges: From XP to Vista the huge change for us was the focus on security. The security world isn't getting any easier . . . the focus on Windows 7 has been speed and simplicity.

Some of the things it will enable from a PC or application virtualisation perspective [include] connecting multiple PCs together in a home environment. You think of a scenario today where you might have two or three computers in your home and that will increase over time as the house becomes a more connected environment; you think about the challenges about linking computers together and accessing information and moving from one PC to the next.

Windows 7 will have some big improvements. In the home, in the business, the combination of collaboration, the wireless, the remote workforce as well as the speed and simplicity of the operating system and keeping the security implements from Vista will be the biggest change.
 
 
Markets to watch

 
CRN: With costs at the forefront of a lot of decisions, is the green angle being left behind? Is the green theme slipping from the industry's consciousness?

Scott Robertson: From the SMB side, green IT was never a big focus. It was on everybody's mind but we never saw any SMB put it high on the weighted side.

What we've seen, though, because businesses have ongoing costs of maintaining their technology and certainly from a data centre perspective if you have 65 firewalls out there running at very high amp levels, that has a multiple effect on running costs.

Green is more at the higher end enterprise space.
 
David Henderson: Green IT is a bit of a buzz word. If you're talking to customers about sustainability of the planet long-term, if you (talk) to that customer as an individual, none of them will say, no I'm not interested in the future of my grandchildren. If I'm a smaller reseller or SMB, there's no question this is a major influence in government purchasing and education.

So we have an opportunity to push it. You either believe in sustainability or you don't and if you do you have a responsibility to drive it.
Dell built a whole business model around green IT. In the right place it creates an edge.
 
Gerard Florian: Clients' requirements were previously better, faster, cheaper - it's still better, faster, cheaper and green.

I was talking to a client the other day and the IT department was looking at videoconferencing and measurement around that to feed it back into their corporate social responsibility program and quite clearly they're not setting greenhouse reduction targets - they're simply saying our message to our customer base, our shareholders, is that we want to be seen as an efficient operation.

There's barely a tender that goes by now that doesn't deal with the waste issue and from an industry point of view power is the focus, but how we deal with waste is a far bigger, unanswered issue that costs more.
 
Maree Lowe: We invested two years ago in a new company called Canberra data centres and Julia Gillard opened it last June; last week it got the AIIA award for green and environmental data centre - and it's an absolute drawcard.

We've got two major departments in and two about to sign up and it is the most innovative in terms of (electricity) generation but what draws people in is its cost savings. Energy power consumption over three years minimum that will extend to 10 I hope - the cost savings are huge. People aren't coming in just because it's green.
 
Paul Voges:  Labor was elected on its green policies and as you move into discussion about industries that are resilient in the downturn we are seeing very strong growth in the public sector. We've been talking to educators, health, local councils, state government agencies, federal agencies and sustainability is key so any resellers in the SMB space or the state and federal government space need to be closely aligned to the government policies and environmental sustainability is one of them.
 
Ross Cochrane:  A lot of the short-term gimmicky things on green have been done - plant a tree - and people have seen past those and a lot of things organisations are doing is not visible.

To write the (emissions trading) policy takes some time and a lot of organisations are in the throes of doing that. There's a lot of work going on in the background and getting that to work through your organisation takes a lot of time.

We did some short-term things to get some visibility with our staff and customers to show there was a sustainability issue that we all need to work on but it was all ad hoc.

In recent times we've spent a lot of time to really understand - signing up to the national packaging covenant where you have to put in place key performance indicators (for the delivery of paper-based products).

We have to work with suppliers and work out how they can drive down costs and their carbon footprint from doing deliveries because we don't do them so we have to understand what they're doing about it. It's a complex environment, there's no short-term gimmicky things that will work - you need to invest behind it.

But you have to be very aware of it because it's on the agenda. You're better off to invest the time doing something that will give you benefit long-term rather than just doing short-term things.
 
David Henderson: If you listen to Obama, he predicts America will turn around by bringing innovation to sustainability. The business opportunities there are fantastic. The rust belts will go through a transformation and a lot of our industry has a tremendous opportunity to move forward with that transformation and to leverage it.
 
 
CRN: One theme is that it's much harder for generalist resellers to survive in a downturn than specialists.

Specialisation seems to be one of the best ways to get to know the customers, to bring them more value because you understand their business and then, like a cookie-cutter, take that to other, similar businesses. What does the roundtable see in the market?

The (number of) technologies (and vendors) that are in the market are phenomenal and a lot of resellers are struggling to get across all those. And we're seeing a lot of specialisation, a lot of verticalisation as people are making sure they're following their core competency . . . as the pressure winds up.

We see a lot more requests coming through for us, particularly around more complicated technologies, to check the whole solution not just to provide a product but to make sure it's correct because they may not have [enough specialists].

We also see a lot of collaboration between resellers. So one reseller might have specialisation in virtualisation and one reseller might have specialisation in unified comms and we're seeing that come together.
 
CRN: How do they start that conversation? Do you put them in touch with each other?
Wendy O'Keeffe: We do help people partner together like that because we do have that knowledge and we're in a privileged position where we see the entire market from a vendor's perspective and a customer's perspective.

A lot of them (resellers) are already in unique communities, whether that be geographical communities or technology communities. In the Microsoft community they've specialised in certain areas and they know each other or go to conferences or whatever.

So we can be part of that.
In some of the programs we've gone to market with we've had that collaboration built in so that people can meet other people.
 
Wayne Small: I totally agree. We do a lot of work where we're actually supporting other resellers who are technically our competitors. And we've got certain technical strengths which they don't have.

The customer remains theirs and we build a symbiotic relationship with the reseller to support the customer ultimately. That's one of the ways we can all survive the tougher economic times by supporting each other through that type of mechanism.

Where relationships don't exist we look to distributors and vendors to find somebody who's better in this area. One of the areas where we're doing a fair bit of work is virtualisation, VoIP and unified communications - now, if we didn't know some of those areas we'd start to look to our distributors and vendors for guidance. Who can I talk to?
 
David Henderson: My experience is that Melbourne (resellers) are more responsive to working together rather than Sydney.
 
Wayne Small: I totally disagree.
 
Wendy O'Keeffe: I know that in the (Melbourne) Cisco community they work together very, very well.
 
John Walters: At the Microsoft conference at Port Douglas, sure the distributors are there and we talk to our customers who are resellers, as you do, mainly around the bar probably.

Microsoft, the vendor, is always there talking to their resellers but the majority of time if you sit back and have a look it is resellers talking to resellers because of what Wayne's saying and I'm seeing that more and more over the years of my time in the channel where resellers are talking to each other and spending a lot of their time at conferences and networking events discussing opportunities.

And a number of resellers generally approach us and say: "I want to expand into Brisbane, is there a reseller up there I should look at to potentially purchase?" or whatever. And that starts as a collaboration exercise. There's a lot of that happening and in my time in the channel it's becoming more and more prevalent.
 

Maree Lowe: You also look for someone who's an entree into the market. With some of the more recent opportunities we've been involved in, particularly in the imaging area it's a major (partner) who knows that corporate customer, the risk of the project is so huge that as an SMB reseller we'll never get that business but if we work with that major partner we'll deliver what we do well and they'll deliver their portion. We've done that with some recent bids where someone has the product and we had the services.
 
Scott Robertson: We've seen that with our resellers as well. They may be a data storage player and they've got their customer lists but they work with a security reseller who can therefore provide the security around that database solution so by introducing to each others' accounts they are naturally expanding their reach into these existing customers - it's a natural way to grow, it's kind of organic growth through a partnership.

Security has been a great avenue for a lot of specialised partners and infrastructure players to get in and once you've handed over your security to a partner, a reseller, there's a huge element of trust behind that. We went into an education account with a security lead - the solution for us was maybe only $20,000 but the virtualisation contract [the reseller won] over the three-year life of the deal was worth hundreds of thousands [of dollars] to them.

It was a very large deal over the whole [UTM/XTM] infrastructure and those are the sorts of deals we want to introduce to other partners. It was an interesting case of specialisation getting them into that account and then being able to broaden the space out into the rest of the infrastructure.
 
Ross Cochrane: There's an interesting dynamic - from a vendor perspective, specialisation is what vendors push and they drive the channel to be like that. Resellers want that specialisation and get that recognition but a lot of end customers prefer to have one relationship and get those people to take care of everything.

[The end-user] is not that interested in the vendor, that they have that specialisation just in voice; they don't want the voice to work only, they want the whole thing to work.

We have seen some of our resellers take the approach that they are becoming more generalist so the trend is that resellers' go-to-market strategy is more customer centric than technology centric. They don't go away with a list and say I only do voice and I only do security, do you want to buy those?

They can't afford to do that, they go to the customer, try to understand what the customer's issues are and leverage that relationship to find opportunities and then they have to find the resources from their own base or partner and bring people in as they need to.

In this environment a lot of resellers understand that chasing new customers is an expensive exercise. They are often serviced by somebody else, anyway, and quite often going back to your existing base, and really trying to understand how you sell them more technology, how you help them get more benefit out of the technology you've already sold them by delivering more service or upgrading them or doing whatever (is the best) approach.

Most resellers, if you asked "how many customers do you have?" they'll exaggerate the number, often greatly. Like in most businesses, there's going to be a small number [of customers] that make up most of the business and little bits they've done somewhere along the way that they'll call a customer - it's probably somebody else's customer - and for many of them, they're starting to turn around and say, 'well, hang on, if I really focus on my core competencies and go for the relationships I've already invested in there are opportunities if I just spend some time working them out'.
 
CRN: From where does the push to mid-markets come? Is it because bigger customers are holding off spending coming into the recession? How should resellers deal with that?

Wendy O'Keeffe: The vendors have been looking at that since 2008, late 2007 so I don't think that's a recession issue per se other than that if you look at how the vendors globally have grown at phenomenal rates. They've been seeking geographies and technologies to keep that growth. So the mid-market became a discussion 16 months ago.
 
John Walters: In addition to that, technology has become more ubiquitous. Then obviously the enterprise level, vendors and the technology they bring to market has a role to play in the SMB market.
 
David Henderson: Trying to move a vendor out of an enterprise is exceedingly expensive. Trying to enter a market through SMBs is low margins and a lot of marketing. As a vendor, if you're coming into the market, it's the mid-tier you have to address because it's the easiest point of entry, it's sales-driven so you see a lot of activity.

In the recession we're seeing negative to flat growth in the enterprise and we all know that SMB is just surviving, so the only growth market would be mid-tier. The behaviour is being driven by access to the market and cascading enterprise technology down to the mid-tier. It's not about the recession, it's a business conversation.

A lot of Australia and all of New Zealand is mid-market. Our market is exactly mid-tier and SMB.
 

CRN: What opportunities does China present for resellers?

David Henderson: China's coming out of this economic maelstrom better and quicker than anyone else. They are buying commodities now and putting them in warehouses but it's still a very high-growth environment internally.

They're still building; they still need designers, engineers and architects. There's a lot of engineering companies and architects in Australia that service that market and you'll see more of that. I feel a great deal of optimism because of China. Local resellers will benefit from that Asian perspective.
 
Ross Cochrane:  In this kind of economy it's high risk. Most resellers are saying to us they're not looking for big risk, they're looking for something they're pretty comfortable with. If you are already selling (to architects) but if you're deciding to go and find some new customers in that space you will probably find that market is saturated with existing resellers.

We signed Autodesk recently and we found a whole lot of resellers we didn't even know existed who specialised in that area. An interesting thing is it depends on your definition because if you have a business geared for 50 percent growth, you design a business around the kind of high market-growth expectations - and IT has high-growth market expectations - vendors, distributors and resellers have all been in this environment where, hey, isn't it boring, engineering is growing at 4 percent and we're in this 30 percent growth industry and we all build business models that expect that. And when it changes, that's the challenge: how do you change from this high-growth expectation to a much more mature (industry).

And my view is that we need to learn how to cope with that long-term because it will go from being this high growth (industry). We were getting growth rates of 70-80 percent in the glory days of the mid-90s and high-margin.

Suddenly the conditions change and your model is one that is exposed that needs high-growth and a lot of lubrication around it in terms of margin and all of a sudden you find that doesn't exist and you go, 'Whoa!' That's the challenge, that's where that risk comes in, because you say I'm already exposed because conditions have changed and now on top of that what I need to find is a level where I've got a sustainable model that works for these conditions, which might be the forever conditions. My view is the future will look more like the present than it looks like the past.
 
David Henderson: So is this just a boring downturn?
 
Ross Cochrane:  We're in better shape today than when the dot-com bust happened. When that happened the channel was in much poorer shape and that had bigger impact. We're in better shape today, there's more skills, there's more depth, there's more quality in the businesses than there was back then.

The tactics of surviving the downturn
 
CRN: Marketing is an area where resellers can do a better job. It's a core business skill to get out there to tell a customer why they should go to them rather than to someone else. Where are resellers still lacking?

Maree Lowe:  For the past two weeks we've been very busy on a business plan for a new product and it was interesting to go look at what we have been doing and where our current marketing strategies are and looking at the research and the major importance of what we all know is the web, search capabilities, email [electronic direct mail] as opposed to direct mail [in the post].

The importance of conferences and just seeing how over the next 24 months the message was clearly: digital, digital, digital. I've stopped opening the paper. I'm thinking digital marketing is much cheaper and far more cost-effective. I have 23,000 [prospects] in the database and I could bring it down to 13,000 and I could bring it down again and how good is the database?

Do I have it in shape to be really working with it digitally? When you're looking at a business plan, I'm thinking short-term, long-term. The short-term is what drives you today and the next couple of years, but trying to bank on do we go down this investment path, do we train our people, is this going to be a one-year or two-year business plan?

I remember a certain storage product eight years ago, evangelised for two years and no one wanted to know about it and then all of a sudden, bang, it goes to the top of the list.

So trying to work these decisions of where to put the money in, now knowing it won't give a return. And normally in tough times you batten the hatches and stop R&D and anything that isn't earning the dollars, you put it a little on the back-burner  - I think they're the really difficult things.

Short term, what do I have to do? You have 185 people - how do you keep all around the country boiling and yet how do I bank on what next year's wave is going to be and the investment I have to put in there? And that's what I find difficult.
 
David Henderson:  The thing that I found interesting is we had two partners who called lists, 500 customers, cold. The first partner made 56 appointments - 10 percent conversion - that's really impressive. The second partner [had 90 appointments].

The conclusion we're drawing from that is customers are of a mind to look at their options. This is the time to take every dollar you have and ram it into marketing. It's really about driving customers now because as we have a conversation about costs customers are thinking that maybe they should be doing something different?

So I think this is a fantastic time for resellers to go out and really drive marketing campaigns. But not the big-bang stuff; go to a customer and say: 'Here is the value proposition'.

The first critical thing is to understand what you are offering and then ram it into a market segment and I think you're going to find a very, very fertile field.
 
Wayne Small: How do you explain the difference in success rates? Did you use a telemarketing company?
 
David Henderson: I thought 10 percent was really fantastic. We had our sales organisation, myself and our partner sales organisation on the phone doing cold calling . . . around VMWare. Who's going to argue with: 'We think you can save 80 percent on your infrastructure?' Who's going to argue with you?
 
CRN: David, do you think that degree of openness from the end-user is the fear of going with the wrong option, to have explored every avenue so that they're not exposed?

David Henderson: If you're sitting in a bunker as a reseller trying to protect what you have, I have really bad news for you. The back door to the bunker is wide open. You have to be in there, really close and talking about opportunities [with your customers]. We have a real sense of optimism about that.
 
Paul Voges:  What has changed in the past 12 months has been, particularly in a high-growth market, the customers were interested in technology because they were trying to differentiate themselves - you think of a CIO's view of the world. Now with the cost pressures they're under the difference between a good reseller and a reseller that needs some development are the ones that know how to sell a really strong business case, because the reseller has to uncover latent demand and bring some awareness to a customer that hasn't thought about an issue before and articulate a very clear business case.

In the past, there's lots of savings and efficiencies promised [by resellers] but I think one of the reasons why the dot-com [bust] occurred was because IT lost a lot of confidence from the customer audience and now it's a skill the reseller needs - not just marketing but that real strong returns [on investment] story for the customer that he can't articulate.

A customer can have the best intentions in the world but is not going to sign the contract, spend another $100,000 or a million dollars unless they can show to their board [a good return on investment]. What we are seeing a change in is where in the past a CIO had the power to sign a sales transaction that is now going to the board. So that skills set is more important.

There will be a lot of dialogue, a lot of interest but the hard, financial case will be more important now than ever.
 
Wendy O'Keeffe: We're an SMB in this market . . . 250 people in Asia and we don't get any engagement from resellers. I'm not criticising . . . and when we go to markets for an engagement we've already written our scope, we've already thought about what we want and we'll go and specifically target it.

But we don't have the reseller coming back afterwards going 'how did it go, did you have a good implementation, did you get the return on investment that you want'. Nothing.
We did a Sharepoint thing last year and we have three stages of that but the resellers didn't come back and ask us if we're at stage two. And it's a huge issue.
 
Gerard Florian: The days of running a campaign and jagging a large deal is  highly unlikely. The sheer buying pattern of most organisations now is as a distributor. So your Sharepoint project isn't one massive project it's three or four projects. So from a marketing point of view part of the challenge is to continue to drive marketing messages around successful deployments as well as features, benefits.

You take your Windows 7 story and there's going to be an initial hype phase, which obviously the vendor will be responsible for, but then there's going to be a range of things to come after that . . . so from a marketing point of view that becomes a real challenge, as well is how to  put those messages out.

A case study not of a win but how is Sharepoint going 12 months [after implementation] is of far more value than someone who has signed with an intent over the next three years to spend all this money and we never hear what ultimately happens to it.
 
Wayne Small: One of the biggest things I find a lot of my colleagues don't do in the market is they don't go back and say 'how did that deployment go, was it a good experience for you, what can we do better?' They don't seek this process of continual improvement in themselves and what they're doing and therefore they don't get more business from that customer.

From a marketing perspective we get probably 99 percent of our business from word of mouth and we're on target for somewhere between 70-80 percent revenue growth this year. We can't put staff on fast enough, good staff. This is a problem we want to have. It's also a really hard problem. One of the key reasons why we're growing is we're maintaining that relationship with the client. We're going back to you after the deployment and saying: How was it? What can we do better?

In a lot of larger organisations there's an account manager that looks after that client and he gets moved somewhere else so the client loses that contact.
 
Wendy O'Keeffe: What also happens is that the specialist put in to do the implementation - the engineer or certified engineer - they're not sales guys, they do their bit and they walk away.
 
Wayne Small: But it's those guys that build the relationship with the client and that's how you get the continuing sales.