Alanis Morissette missed an irony
And it is all about IT vendors
Teenagers of the 90s will recall the famous 'Ironic' song by Alanis Morissette, where some of the points made in the song were not ironic at all.
However, I've been spending the past few days at Ingram Micro's global Cloud Summit and i cannot hold back anymore.
It has been a great event for me - plenty of networking with genuine VARs without any PR people breathing down my neck and making sure I didn't talk to anyone without their say so. Absolute bliss.
So before I launch into my latest tirade, thanks to Ingram UK for including me in proceedings like a normal human being, rather than a journalist who is going to just distort the truth and put words into people's mouths.
It is nice to feel trusted.
However, part of being able to mingle with the attendees from all over the US and Europe is the fact that I get real feedback and it affirms exactly what I make of things too.
My main gripe, is that at events like these, and ideed at CRN's own events, people get up on stage and tell channel partners that they must adapt to the to certain models (in this case the cloud) or die, change the way they do business, completely reevaluate their company structure and culture and think about their customers' needs more.
Indeed a report I wrote for CRN recently - The IT Buyers Guide - says the same thing (bar adapting the cloud model or die). Customers are more savvy and are not interested in sales people pitching products in technical speak, or trying to impress them with accreditations. They want to know how they can use IT to better their business and how much it is going to save them.
It is all about knowing your customers and treating them like human beings.
Fair play to the partners in the room, they always take it all in their stride, make notes and nod accordingly.
However the irony starts when vendors get on stage.
It doesn't matter who the vendor is, in most instances they just go into a massive pitch for their latest product offerings and how wonderful they are and how such and such a partner is making bazillions by selling this product etc etc. Pitch, pitch, pitch.
No explanation of why this product will help partners, how it will benefit their business, what it actually means for them in terms of investment and time spent getting to know the product - just slides and slides of figures and words that don't mean much at all.
It drives me mad.
In fact I would say this shows a disrespect for partners actually. Because the same vendor that has been lecturing partners to change their business models, is actually unprepared to change their own and actually think about how they can promote their messaging to their partners in a way that actually engages them and helps them.
I don't know who is to blame for this. Over-zealous marketing teams that think nothing is more important than the company mantra, or badly informed PR decisions.
Either way it needs addressing. And quickly.
Because the more I see this happening, the more obvious it becomes that perhaps many vendors really don't understand their own channel partners very much at all.
Now, isn't that Ironic?