EXPERT SPEAK
In a world of consumer changes and
connectivity everywhere, channel
partners are primed to sell new services
and products and play a key role in the
development of the next wave of technology
trends. The channel is now being driven
by three key trends: partner Digital
Transformation, new business models with
a focus on services and customer trends
driving new types of demand.
It’s not just about what’s in the box
anymore, we’re seeing networks open up
a new world of services and solutions for
the channel to offer and customers who are
eager to tap into these to deliver a cuttingedge
customer experience.
TREND ONE: Channel business models
– it’s not just about the box, it’s about what
the box gives you.
Across the entire channel, from alliance
partners to distributors and systems
integrators, we’re seeing partners start to
ready themselves and their business models
for a new technological landscape and how
to keep their offerings relevant within it.
Partners are looking five years ahead to
anticipate what they will be selling and
where their revenue will be coming from.
Distributors who once would have
been a logistics partner or driving channel
enablement are now rethinking their role
for example. The cloud is a prime example
of this – it’s changed the business model of
partners significantly. Hardware is no longer
the key revenue driver and whereas before
you might have expected hardware sales to
account for most of your business, it’s now
completely swapped to be a software-first
market instead.
The role of the vendor to help support
and enable partners through this transition
is vital. It’s about ensuring the incentives and
support you give your partners is correctly
aligned to the market they are trying to sell
to. It’s also about how you advise on the
advantages and disadvantages of CAPEX
and OPEX installations, and ensuring you’re
embedded within the channel to give your
Sherifa Hady,Channel Sales Director, EMEA, Aruba
partners the use cases, case studies and best
practice to sell in this new type of market.
Some partners are already there and
know where they want to go next. Others
are still figuring out what their path ahead
looks like.
TREND TWO: Channel partners race to
bring new service offerings to the market.
The channel knows that services are an
essential part of their business model. The
future lies in consumption.
There are three ways that partners are
pursuing this now. They might be reselling
the services offered through vendors,
managing assets and services for customers
or developing their own services and
intellectual property offerings.
Here again, we can clearly see the role
that the cloud has played in influencing the
market. It was a wake-up call for partners
– if everyone goes straight to the cloud
provider to buy their services then how do
you sell around this? The cloud has hugely
disrupted how people consider buying IT.
For partners who embrace services,
however, the rewards can be significant. From
a profitability perspective, if everyone is just
selling the same AP then the opportunity
for margins is limited – but if you can sell
maintenance and services on top of this then
there’s a huge business opportunity.
It also means you can get much closer
to your customers. Longer term service
agreements mean you learn to understand
their challenges and how you can solve
them together. The benefits for customer
retention are huge.
Finally, partners with the technology
and technical skills to develop their own IP
offerings will be able to really stand out and
differentiate themselves in the market. It
drives their capabilities beyond just vendor
specific offerings.
By the end of 2020, this is one of the
most significant developments we expect to
see in the channel market.
TREND THREE: Partners who focus on
selling based on business outcomes can
win big.
Customer needs will always be a driving
force in the market. For many companies,
IT is no longer just a cost centre in their
business, used for data analysis and report
creation. Instead it’s often a profit centre,
driving revenue, new business models
and enabling the creation of billion-dollar
companies along the way.
For partners, reacting to these changes is
central to setting themselves up for success
in the year and decade ahead.
Fundamentally the usage of IT has
become very different. The customer may
want a new system for their hotel in order to
allow their guests to check in via their phone
and get straight on to the Wi-Fi, but they’re
unlikely to be interested in the detail of the
systems they are buying. They just want to
be able to deploy.
This is a huge opportunity for partners
to talk to their customers about business
outcomes and take a more significant role
within solution development. However, as
customers move away from hardware to
services, partners won’t be able to rely on
them ringing up to order new parts – this sell
requires a much more proactive approach.
The rise of the Edge is one of the final
parts of this puzzle. Over the course of this
year we will continue to see the exponential
growth of connected devices and within that
a need for data and network power to sit at
different points of the network. •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT
TECH CHANNELS Issue 29
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