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Sitting in a brewery listening to the head of
Cisco’s
channel discuss Web 2.0 and the networking giant’s channel, it struck me how
dated this sounded and just how ubiquitous Web 2.0-tagged strategies are
becoming.
For Cisco to only just be discussing this topic with its partners and how it
would affect their business, seemed a little tardy to me.
But this is not reality. In a channel reality, listening to someone discuss a
theory is very different to understanding how or even if this theory affects
your business. And this is what most channel players are trying to understand.
One word that seems to go hand in hand with Web 2.0 is collaboration. At a Cisco
event last week in Dublin, the vendor announced its plans to encourage
resellers, ISVs, vendors and end users to snuggle up and target vertical
sectors.
Many vendors have been calling themselves the Cilla Black of the channel for
years adopting a dating-agency approach to marry up their partners to fulfil
an end-to-end solution so Cisco’s announcement was not a new concept.
But given that it has been late to launch this kind of programme for its
channel, Cisco at least had some flesh to its collaboration bones. The firm
launched a very Web 2.0-style Second Life-esque virtual platform, where partners
can meet ISVs and work together to target specific sectors, then be encouraged
by Cisco to sell these solutions.
IBM
and
Xerox
are just two of the vendors already using Second Life for this type of
collaboration platform and while it is very trendy, it is still just a virtual
reality.
It will not be until the vendors lead by example collaborating with each other
and putting real business help, such as SLAs, audits and margin structure in
place around collaboration that this will become a business reality.
Sara Driscoll is editor of CRN
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Do you agree?
What comes first? The tools or the collaboration?
The point about collaboration is that solutions arise out of dialogue. Virtual worlds are a way of improving that dialogue. Tools without dialogue will not engage the supplier.
You say that Second Life initiatives are 'just virtual realities' as if this is an inferior version of a 'business reality'. Virtual realities are another platform, like the internet, albeit at an early stage of development. Virtual worlds are already part of the business reality and will become more significant over time.
Posted by Bret Treasure | 14 Sep 2007
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