'We're all finding our niche'

CRN's Doug Woodburn reflects on how far the channel - led by bellwethers Computacenter and SCC - has come from its box-shifting salad days

"We are all finding our niche".

That was a comment made by SCC chief executive James Rigby in a recent interview with CRN, in reference to how all the big resellers have strove in recent years to evolve beyond their roots in hardware supply.

And it's an interesting comment coming from the boss of a company which in the past relied on being big, rather than niche, to bring home the bacon.

Even companies as large as SCC and Computacenter are being forced to carve out a speciality for themselves in the increasingly service-driven world.

SCC's is in datacentre and cloud services, a business it expects will generate £40m revenues next. Computacenter, meanwhile, is becoming a powerful force in outsourced desktop services, recently being named as the UK's second best IT outsourcing supplier in terms of customer satisfaction.

I like to think the buzz around cloud is 50 per cent generated by reality and 50 per cent hype. After all, cloud accounted for less than a third of the overall IT infrastructure market in Q1, according to IDC, while Gartner says the fluffy form of IT will not overtake on-premise to become the bulk of new IT spend until next year.

Rigby himself admitted that cloud has been over-hyped, and forms only part of the answer for most customers: SCC's role is to act hub tying together all their on-premise, private and public cloud needs in a single wrap.

But the fact Computacenter and SCC are now both generating over half of their gross profits from services shows the extent these two channel bellwethers have had to evolve to remain at the front of the pack.

If you don't know what your niche is - other than supplying hardware and software - your chances of survival are grim.