Distributors speak out at Pipeline 2023

Distributors and marketplace partners have spoken out on a range of challenges they see partners dealing with, on day two of CRN Pipeline 2023 on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

With many partners having dealt with tricky trading conditions, costs and customer demands over the past year, CRN editor in chief William Maher asked them for their view of the way forward.

Crayon’s Vice President of Sales - Tech for Good, Tovia Va'aelua, laid out the opportunity in the not-for-profit sector, which is attracting billions in funding globally to address technology needs.

In New Zealand, Va'aelua said, a large amount of 83 percent of government funding gets pushed to smaller projects “and it’s becoming the same in Australia,” he said. “There are not enough partners to serve those small organisations’ technical needs.”

Va'aelua noted that partners are not necessarily discounting not-for-profit work. He also talked about the opportunity he’s seeing for partners as commercial organisations fund projects in the not-for-profit sector.

He also saw an opportunity for more collaboration in the channel community to address the not-for-profit sector’s needs.

Pax8 VP Communities and Ecosystem APAC, James Bergl, told partners that small and mid-size MSPs needed to specialise to compete.

“We’ve got these conglomerate MSPs coming in, and they’ve got economies of scale, so if you’re not getting a competitive advantage through specialising you’re going to get pushed out on price,” he commented.

“Have a think about the impact on your customers of Covid, security attacks or cyber insurance; your customers are looking at those changes and how MSPs can support them. Pick one of those lanes and go deep at becoming a business expert or a technical expert.”

CRN asked Ingram Micro’s Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for ANZ, Tim Ament, about the complexity for partners trying to navigate the market. He also pointed to the complexity of many channel transactions.

While cloud has been a major focus at Pipeline, Ament reminded the audience that it remains one half of the challenge.  

"It's not just a cloud world, it's not just a physical on-premise world, it's a hybrid world. So how do you make sure that you have solutions and relevancy across both?" he said, pointing to the need for marketplaces that allow for the gamut of transaction types.

Ament also talked about opportunities for partners to expand their businesses. This included MSPs expanding into traditional infrastructure, traditional infrastructure resellers expanding into public cloud and specialised MSPs looking to grow while maintaining a core focus on cloud.

Making business easier for channel SMBs was a focus for Kelly Johnson, Sales Director at Arrow ECS ANZ. She noted that in her view, many partners are dealing with billing and reconciliation headaches.

While some partners bring in a partner to build a platform to manage things, Johnson argued against that approach, in part due to the resources required.

She also touched on the opportunity for partners with suitable platforms for managing this, to offer those platforms to their clients who require self-service.

Dicker Data head of sales for ANZ, Yasser Elgammal, urged partners to evaluate whether their distributor was addressing a range of key issues around recurring revenue, diversification and customer retention.

“Partners should evaluate their distie by asking if are they innovating. Are they identifying new revenue streams? Are they providing me the education and support to grow? Is the distie acquiring enough new resources?” Elgammal commented.

He also pointed to partners’ finance considerations, noting the need for a financer that knows the business and can provide simple, quick approvals.

Fifteen CEO Michael Harte was asked about partners breaking out of traditional offering silos.

“There is a need for partners to stay relevant to the customer. But that can be highly difficult, introducing new technologies, new expertise. And that can be very, very challenging,” Harte noted.

In another sign of how distribution landscape has shifted, Harte explained that Fifteen is tackling this by bringing together its own engineering team and solutions, distribution, and services to augment partners.