A pirate in the clouds at Channel Conference 2010
Participants enjoyed wide-ranging discussion at this year's Conference but it always came back to cloud computing
“I believe in markets. I believe that markets will always find a level – whether that is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We live in a financial democracy, and therefore the markets will dictate.” That’s according to Joe Hemani, founder and owner of Westcoast, who gave a somewhat swashbuckling address to this year’s CRN Channel Conference, held in Reading recently.
Hemani offered some entertaining and thoughtful insights into his early days as a pirate radio DJ – when he even got arrested at one point – and the founding of Westcoast, as well as the secrets to his ongoing success. Honesty, he said, is key, as well as investing in and retaining the right people and knowing how to climb out of the debt trap that many growing businesses experience, which he dubbed “the valley of death”.
He was followed by the no-less witty Professor Douglas McWilliams, chief executive at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), who noted that the IT industry no longer operated on a plane of its own, seemingly above the slings and arrows of economic fortune. The ‘big picture’ has become ever more relevant to purveyors of IT, as not only is it affected by the troubles of the rest of the business and consumer world, it also has the ability to provide part of the solution in difficult times.
Next year would be tough, McWilliams said, but the IT channel is best placed to lead the recovery.
It might have been a whole-of-channel event but the one word never far from everyone’s lips this year at Channel Conference was cloud.
Shaun Frohlich, director for partner sales at Microsoft, devoted his entire talk to the transition to cloud – as did Andy Burton, chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum, and Jorre Belpaire, channel sales director at Zenith Infotech Europe.
“I do think I have never come across a customer who has the right level of IT, whether it is servers or whatever. Offerings through the cloud now give you that scaleability,” Frohlich said.
He couldn’t resist a product pitch, however. “With Microsoft BPOS, there will be a new release every 90 days. So the functionality gets better every 90 days,” he said.
Whatever approach is taken to the cloud, it is certain that channel firms will have to keep adapting their business models to keep their edge – as well as their customers. Tiffani Bova, vice president for global research into indirect channel programmes and sales strategies at Gartner, updated her take on the market and mapped the way forward for partners.
The channel must work harder at figuring out exactly where they will fit in future.
“You need to match up with customers on where and how they want to buy,” said Bova. “Now, everybody is saying ‘I’m in the cloud’ but fundamentally not much has yet changed in their business model itself. Are your customers now requiring technology differently?”
This year’s panel debate shone a spotlight on distribution, in conjunction with CRN’s ongoing campaign investigating the role of distribution and what its place will be in the months and years to come.
Paul Barlow, managing director at Servium, went head to head with Barrie Desmond, business development director at VADition, and John Toal, UK managing director at Avnet. The tripartite discussion – even refereed by event chairman John Chapman of IT Reality -- was somewhat tense.
The role of large distributors and benefit to VARs was questioned in a world where specialisation and customisation have become the name of the channel game – especially when there is so much vendor, reseller and distributor consolidation going on.
Offerings have converged – and will keep converging – across the entire spectrum of IT, but customers still want bespoke offerings that are best suited to their own specific needs, niches, and verticals. How then can this be best addressed by large, cross-market, consolidated distributors?
Yet distribution plays, and most think it will keep playing, an important role.
“In general, having worked for larger resellers and now a smaller reseller, the role that the distributor provides is invaluable. And it is possibly even more valuable to small and medium sized resellers than larger ones able to get all the skills and so on themselves,” said Servium’s Barlow.
Tim Barnsley, founding member at the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, came at partnerships from another angle, hinting that vendor/reseller relations needed to move from being simple partnerships to more strategic alliances where a joint effort is exerted to meet mutualised goals and opportunities.
IT to lead UK out of recession>> www.channelweb.co.uk/2271469