December 1
Recently CBL’s Business Development Manager, Kalle Almer, attended a panel format event discussing the current state of the economy and the effects on the Canadian IT industry. Attendees also discussed the direction the IT community might pursue going forward. The tone was set around “Solutions define Opportunity” in the Enterprise Storage and Virtualization space focusing on technical solutions and management solutions as the essential components. Each of the panelists expressed their general views on the changes that are taking place in the IT community while injecting pitches on how they are best suited to partner with in the current climate.
Partner to Partner (P2P) relationship optimization was viewed as the direction to follow where specialization was driving the current business model as the channel becomes leaner. It was noted that the channel players in general are getting smaller but the overall IT business volume remained static, just spread over a greater number of players given the loss of a major player last year. The channel has increasingly become more reliant on the distributor for inventory of product and shipping to the customer in their effort to reduce their own overhead.
Another important observation was that transaction volumes have increased while the dollar value of the transactions have decreased, which is attributed partially to tighter credit availability. Rick Reid of Tech Data suggested that they might go so far as to invoice on behalf of the channel given their expertise in credit application screening and their effective collection of overdue accounts. As it stands now, Tech Data deals with the vendors on behalf of the channel, stocks the inventory for the channel, configures the systems for the channel and ships the finished product to the customer on behalf of the channel. The next logical step could very well be invoicing on behalf of the channel.
Unified Communications (UC) is the next hot topic that should create new opportunities for the channel and distributors. It will be very interesting to see how things unfold given the current economic conditions.
Category: business
Tags: business, it industry, partners
