Leader's national roadshow lands in Melbourne

Hundreds of resellers and MSPs attended Leader’s Melbourne expo at Caulfield Racecourse last Thursday.

More than 50 vendors' products were on show at the event, which was held online in recent years.

The Melbourne expo was the fourth stop for Leader’s national roadshow. The expo kicked off in Brisbane in September and has since rolled on to Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, before it finishes at Perth's Crown Convention Centre on 8 November.

Click through the photo gallery for the rest of our summary of the Melbourne event.

Pictured: BLR Solutions Tim Nicholas and Leader national trainer Alex Bantjes.

“Resellers and MSPs need to make their clients sticky,” Leader director of enterprise and marketing Ben Klason told CRN.

“Part of that is about diversifying their offerings and knowing all the solutions that are out there."

"It means that when the MSP’s client comes to them with a new problem or wants to innovate or expand in some way the MSP knows how to support them and the client won’t move onto someone else.”

Pictured, from left to right: Poly consumer and retail lead – APAC Charlie Harb, Leader director of enterprise and marketing Ben Klason, Poly sales operations manager Carl Anthony, ITSoft Solutions director Amit Patel.

Microsoft, Intel, Lenovo, Ubiquiti, Milesight, Patchbox and Watchguard presented at the Leader event.

Ubiquiti presented a session about “unifying indoor and outdoor networking, voice, video and security in one brand.”

Chinese AIoT surveillance vendor Milesight, which appointed Leader to distribute its 5G enabled routers and cameras in July, spoke about "smart and accessible surveillance."

Lenovo presented tips for server and data centre solutions. Lenovo's data centre business Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (Lenovo ISG) appointed Leader to distribute its unified cloud-based software management platform, servers, storage and edge solutions in Australia last month.

Pictured, left to right: Specialist IT director Patrick Bolch and Lenovo ISG channel executive Sul Ciardulli.

Klason told CRN one of the ways Leader distinguished itself from other disties was its focus on “small to medium resellers.” 

“Every one of our resellers gets an account manager. A lot of disties will only provide one to their biggest resellers.” 

Pictured, left to right: IT-Mate Solutions sales consultant Patrick Sillah, IT-Mate Solutions technical consultant Rizni Rila, and Leader senior account manager Harish CK.

Jim’s IT national manager Tony Altun told CRN that their team went to the expo to “get educated about new products.”

“There’s always a new solution or a new vendor. We’re always pushing our staff to stay on top of that. 

“Leader have an old-school style that works really well. You’ve got a personal relationship with your account manager. 

“A lot of other distie’s account managers just work over email with you. We meet up with ours over coffee. They’re always there: always available when you need a new solution,” Altun said.

Altun said that Jim's IT’s client base was “small businesses or consumers mostly.”

“We work in managed networks, managed services, IT support, security, and procurement among other things.”

Pictured: Jim’s IT technician Steven Gavin (left) and Jim’s IT national manager Tony Altun (right).

Melbourne Wifi Kate Huckson (left) Melbourne Wifi owner and principal consultant Adam Horton (right).

Shuttle sales manager Zoe He and Comstar IT solutions managing director Stanislav Kouprine.

From left to right: Scorptec Computers retail sales assistant James Tigani, Scorptec Computers commercial sales support Herman So, Scorptec Computers aftersales service assistant manager Arthur Rosa.

Leader enterprise category product manager Chris Sutherland and Resolve IT Maddy Beckwith.

Interscale head of business development Andy Tran.