NEC dangles the partnership carrot

Steven Stenton, commercial product manager, NEC Australia, said the vendor is looking at several system integrators to resell and install its solutions. NEC currently has around 140 dealers nationwide.

According to Stenton, going forward NEC will be looking far more at the systems integrations business and bringing onboard more channel partners to actually do systems integration with. .

“There’s no secret in the marketplace we’ve brought on board Brennan IT as one of our key systems integration partners," he said. "We’re now looking round the marketplace to see who else we should be striking strategic alliances with. Should we be looking at somebody like Dimension Data, should we be looking at somebody like a 3D Networks or Gen-I? Because we work closely with them anyway on a lot of occasions.”

Stenton said NEC is also shifting business tactics, moving from a standard product sell to a more "people-focussed" approach. The approach ascertains the roles of individual employees in an organisation and determines the best method of communication to boost their efficiency.

According to Stenton, based on the success of this approach for NEC, the channel can also use the strategy to increase its business.

“The key opportunities I would see for the channel,this even goes down to the smaller dealers, is to actually be able to look their customer in the eye and say we want to look at your business, we don’t want to just sell you a box,” he said.