Riders on the storm

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.