CDW, CGI, Computacenter, Softcat, SCC, Insight Direct, Trustmarque and XMA have made it onto the East Midlands Commercial Strategy Unit’s (EMCSU) ICT framework.
The ICT VAR framework was announced in July of this year and is valued at an estimated £5 billion. The contract will run for four years until August 2023.
PC sales plunged lower than a Hollywood starlet’s dress in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner Group.
One big reason for the decline was businesses buying fewer desktop computers, according to the Gartner research firm. It noted companies have mostly finished replacing older PCs that used outdated Windows XP software.
PC sales may get a boost later this year when Microsoft releases its next version of Windows, analysts said, but they’re still expecting an overall decline in sales for this year.
Gartner added that there had been an sales of laptop computers and hybrid models that combine features of tablets and laptops. That could help drive a gradual return to growth by next year.
Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa estimates PC makers shipped 71.7 million computers in the first quarter, down 5.2 percent from a year earlier.
Some computer makers are doing better than others. China’s Lenovo saw an increase in worldwide sales, as did its nearest competitor, the maker of expensive printer ink HP.. However smaller companies, including Dell, saw sales decline.
Global PC sales have fallen steadily over the last three years, but Gartner are projecting a return to growth in 2016. Tablet users are giving up on the technology and are moving back to notebooks.
Ten years ago, the very word Dell was enough to send VARs, VADs and, let’s face it, the rest of the channel into streams of invective, punctuated by words you wouldn’t want your nan to hear you speak. Like the expletive “direct sales”, for example.
But, it seems, everything has changed and now Dell loves the channel and, incredibly, the channel seems to love Dell too. Channel Eye took time out from our incredibly stressful schedule to spend a day at a security partner reseller conference in Budapest and got to chat to several senior executives and resellers too, for that matter, who spelled out the sea changes that have happened at the Round Rock company.
While Dell is still seen by many as the PC tin maker that put the wind up conventional and indirect players like HP and the rest, it’s made a number of acquisitions in the last few years that mean the barque is now being steered in an entirely different direction. Those include SonicWALL, Quest and others.
The changes have been engineered at the highest level – that is to say by Michael Dell himself – with the assistance of senior exec Cheryl Cook. Unbelievably for an old channel hack like me, 32 percent of Dell’s business now goes the indirect route, worth an estimated $20 billion of revenue, under the umbrella of Partner Direct.
Channel Eye interviewed senior members of the EMEA channel team, including Andy Zollo and Marvin Blough – executive director of Dell’s worldwide channels and alliances. We also had the opportunity to talk to Patrick Sweeney, executive director of product management at the corporation.
Sweeney said: “Dell is in the process of becoming an end to end supplier of scalable systems. Dell continues to build PCs, but relies on value added resellers (VARs) to be trusted advisors [to customers].” He said that Dell is now a serious player in software and security and offers products that he claimed favourably compete with the likes of Cisco, Fortinet and others. The company, he said, invests heavily in R&D, has a wide breadth of products and the idea of Dell as a major player in security and software is promoted by Michael Dell himself when he makes major announcements.
In fact, Dell has something like 124 VARs in the EMEA region. The trend is that larger companies have started to rely on VARs to help them through the IT maze, whether that be in the cloud, in big data, or in security. Florian Malecki, who is the international product marketing director at Dell, said his company also relies on value added distributors (VADs) to generate events and training schemes.
How does it all work? Under the Dell umbrella of Partner Direct, the company operates certification for its channel partners at different levels, said Zollo. The tiers are premier partners, preferred partners and registered partners, but, he said, Dell is about to introduce a fourth category – managed service providers (MSPs). Dell continues to roll out partnership initiatives and concedes that while it still has direct customers, the trend is to move towards an indirect model to allow it to penetrate different markets. It’s impossible to operate a direct model in the many markets it now plays in.
Zollo says that the company has a “direct touch” sales team that cross sells all the products it has – and this umbrella model means that Dell GCC is able to operate across a wide area of customers and partners.
Who would have thought it? Dell was once a company that wouldn’t even talk to channel publications like ours. But it looks as if it will be talking to us more and more in the future. It relies on its VARs and its VADs for deep levels of specialisation, training and support.
We guess that HP must be gazing at all of this with quite some alarm. And Lenovo, for that matter.
The BizConnect programme from Ciena is being modified.
That’s the message from Nigel Williams, VP of global channels and strategic alliances.
He said in his blog that Ciena is now letting its solution provider partners offer its branded services directly to enterprise customers.
Ciena will provide support, training, lab equipment, evaluations, certifications, customer upsell and other services to its solution providers.
He said Ciena partners from regional VARs to global system integrators wanted to layer branded services combined with equipment sales, and that was the reason for the change.
Data management firm Quantum said it has introduced a new channel programme.
The programme – aimed at managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) offer a cloud back up service using Quantum’s virtual dedupe appliances and vmPro back up software.
The programme uses capacity based, all software subscriptions services which lets VARs and MSPss brand, market and sell Backup as a Service (BaaS). The offering scales as revenue grows and so Quantum thinks that reduces up front capital hardware expenses.
The programme includes online sales and pre-sales training at no charge; customisable matering material; free access to Quantum software for trial and demonstration and technical and support training.
SAP is telling its partners that it is time to cash in on big data. The company estimates that its global partner base will earn up to $220 billion by selling its big data and analytics products.
So it sees a huge opportunity for partners and resellers, who could provide more services and products in addition to SAP software.
A recent IDC report revealed that SAP partners could be in for a lot of growth over the next five years. IDC’s Worldwide Ecosystem Analytics and Big Data: Growth Opportunities for SAP Partners found that EMEA partners could earn $70 billion by 2018, dabbling in big data and analytics. Asia Pacific and Japan should climb to $40 billion, while North America will lead the way with $102 billion.
One of the more curious factoids from the report claims that the digital landscape will grow more than 30 thousand percent between 2005 and 2020, from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes. It’s not called big data for nothing.
“SAP and its partners make a significant impact on the global economy,” said Darren Bibby, vice president for IDC Channels and Alliances Research. “SAP does an excellent job delivering great products for partners to work with, as well as effective sales, marketing and training resources. The result is that the SAP ecosystem is well-positioned for the future and customers will benefit from these additional skills and resources.”
Interestingly, the IDC report concluded that 68 percent of the companies don’t have a business intelligence or analytics strategy, while a whopping 63 percent don’t even know what big data is. However, 69 percent said they are looking for staff who can handle analytics.
As it grows, the industry will change. IDC believes 90 percent of industry growth will come through third-platform technology, cloud, mobile and social.
British value-added resellers will start peddling Microsoft’s Surface tablets to businesses come September. Microsoft has already named ten US VARs who will kick off the enterprise oriented Surface campaign this summer.
The names of British VARs have not been disclosed yet. According to Microsoft UK director for partner strategy Janet Gibbons, only a few select resellers will be able to sell Surface tablets as part of a pilot scheme.
“In every market, we’re positioning [Surface availability] as a pilot… Our only experience of being a hardware provider is with the Xbox, and that’s a different world,” she told CRN. “If we’re going to come to the market with a device, we have to know we are set up well to support the channel with things like warranty, return, credit and distribution of stock [information]. All of that has to be worked through.”
At this point it might be a bit too late. The Surface RT is almost a year old and by the time British VARs enter the fray it should get a successor, give or take a few weeks. The Surface Pro isn’t as stale, but it not a hot new product, either.
Around 10 percent of IT security enterprise products will be delivered through the cloud by 2015, Gartner has said.
Gazing into its crystal ball, the analyst house has also said that these services will also drive changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas, such as secure email and secure Web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).
It said as a result it expected the cloud-based security services market to reach $4.2 billion by 2016.
Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner said demand remained high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly.
He said the shift in buying behaviour from the more traditional on-premises equipment toward cloud-based delivery models offered “good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities.”
He warned that those without such capabilities needed to act quickly to adapt to this “competitive threat.”
Gartner referenced a security survey from January which it said showed high demand from security buyers for cloud-based security service offerings. Security buyers from the US and Europe, representing a cross section of industries and company sizes, stated that they planned to increase the consumption of several common cloud services during the next 12 months.
The highest-consumed cloud-based security service is email security services, with 74 percent of respondents rating this as the top service.
Furthermore, 27 percent of the respondents indicated they were considering deploying tokenisation as a cloud service, while another area cited for growth was security information and event management (SIEM) as a service.
Gartner is now advising value-added resellers (VARs) to supplement product implementations with cloud-based alternatives that offer large customers reduced operational cost and thereby increase the likelihood of customer retention in this market segment. VARs that fail to offer cloud-based alternatives might experience a decline in implementation revenue from customers seeking cloud-based solutions in certain market segments.
Around 10 percent of IT security enterprise products will be delivered through the cloud by 2015, Gartner has said.
Rubbing its crystal ball the analyst house has also said that these services will also drive changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas, such as secure email and secure Web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).
It said as a result it expected the cloud-based security services market to reach $4.2 billion by 2016.
Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner said demand remained high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly.
He said the shift in buying behaviour from the more traditional on-premises equipment toward cloud-based delivery models offered “good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities.”
He warned that those without such capabilities needed to act quickly to adapt to this “competitive threat.”
Gartner referenced a security survey from January which it said showed high demand from security buyers for cloud-based security service offerings. Security buyers from the US and Europe, representing a cross section of industries and company sizes, stated that they planned to increase the consumption of several common cloud services during the next 12 months.
The highest-consumed cloud-based security service is email security services, with 74 percent of respondents rating this as the top service.
Furthermore, 27 percent of the respondents indicated they were considering deploying tokenisation as a cloud service, while another area cited for growth was security information and event management (SIEM) as a service.
Gartner is now advising value-added resellers (VARs) to supplement product implementations with cloud-based alternatives that offer large customers reduced operational cost and thereby increase the likelihood of customer retention in this market segment. VARs that fail to offer cloud-based alternatives might experience a decline in implementation revenue from customers seeking cloud-based solutions in certain market segments.
Ingram Micro and SAP are helping customers make the most of the enterprise mobility market, or so they say.
The dynamic duo have teamed up with Ingram Micro claiming to help leverage its value-added reseller (VAR) channel to help push SAP products into small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) market.
From April 15, 2013, Ingram Micro Mobility will provide its VAR community access to the SAP mobile platform, which includes the SAP Afaria mobile device management service.
Ingram Micro VARs will also have access to SAP’s extensive portfolio of more than 300 mobile apps that support tasks from simple productivity to complex transactions across 24 different industries, employing mobile devices using iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry operating systems.
Here’s their spin. Leveraging Ingram Micro’s extensive distribution infrastructure and expertise will make the SAP apps available in an on-demand fashion through the proven Ingram Micro distribution model to the VAR community and end customers, the company has boasted.
Ingram Micro and SAP expect the relationship to benefit VARs and end-users by providing a cost-effective solution for the SMB market to take advantage of enterprise-class mobile solution software applications to dramatically improve productivity.
Cloud Distribution has hired start up guru Adam Davison in a bid to give its Value Added Distributor competitors a run for their money.
The company claims that other firms offer little or no support to as yet “undiscovered” vendors that have the potential to disrupt the UK market’s status quo.
It claims its new weapon will help it search out next generation networking and security vendors, which will complement its portfolio of disruptive technology products.
Davison has been appointed to seek out companies wishing to bring innovative networking and security technology solutions to the UK. The company boasts it’s best placed to offer these firms the best foothold as understands the market and “delivers real value-add.”
Davidson’s team has, according to the company, already begun to develop tools for the channel, which will help launch these products to the market. These include tailored vendor support launch packs, bespoke sales training, pre-sales and technical training, a virtual marketing team and an end user pipeline generation platform.
Apparently these have all been created to help VARs get up to speed with the new products and grow a network of qualified opportunities.
Adam Davison says he has first-hand experience of what it’s like as a start-up trying to break through. He added there was a real need for a “next-generation distributor” who was willing to put “evangelistic effort into less well-known, but high value proposition vendors.”
Adam’s appointment follows a series of new hires as Cloud Distribution expands and develops its team which has included James Ball, Technical Manager and Tracey Hannan, Sales Manager for the new Northern office.
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