CONSORTIA - Pact and ready to roam

Resellers are forming alliances in a bid to pitch for international contracts against the established giants. But how well is it really working?

Groucho Marx probably had the right idea about gentlemen's clubs, hisontracts against the established giants. But how well is it really working? premise being that any institution willing to accept him as a member was undoubtedly suspect.

But when it comes to selling PCs internationally, reseller clubs - be they consortia, alliances, associations or those that sail under some other flag of convenience - are big business.

Although there are only half a dozen global resellers, collectively they already account for billions of dollars of trade, as customers demand that IT suppliers meet their global launch expectations. Yet despite widespread acceptance that forging a pact with other suppliers makes sense when pitching for international contracts, only a handful of such alliances exists.

Some put the reluctance to form alliances down to a climate of shrinking margins and industry consolidation, which has left many resellers wary of climbing into bed with others, even if located overseas. The idea of sharing price sensitive or strategic information with potential rivals is clearly a deterrent to joining a consortium. But deciding not to do so could prove to be an even bigger blunder.

Take Bill Joss, group business director of reseller Compel, the UK representative of Globalserve, an alliance whose three key partners cover the US, Canada and France, although the group also embraces about 50-odd other associate firms.

Joss admits that when the idea of joining Globalserve was first mooted, he had serious misgivings about its viability - not least because of the risks associated with pooling commercial intelligence with potential rivals. Nor was he convinced that an alliance of resellers could handle a customer's global needs better than a single, internationally focused supplier.

Before joining Compel, Joss was international vice president at communications firm Gandalf, with six subsidiaries of its own to look after, plus a worldwide reseller network. 'My view at the outset was that even a fully owned entity might not be able to manage a global launch better than any other structure,' he says.

'And Compel's view, even today, is still very much that,' he adds. 'We still don't really know whether an association or consortium can deliver globally any more effectively than a single supplier, or vice versa. We're in uncharted waters.'

That's not to say Joss has lost all faith in such alliances. It's more a case of which tendering and order fulfilment model works best. 'I do think consortia can work - but the market still needs some convincing,' he says.

Clients might also be wary of reseller consortia because of their unproven track record and tendency to disappear or fragment almost as soon as they're formed. When Globalserve was established three years ago, for example, Systemhouse was its UK partner. Systemhouse fell by the wayside and Compel stepped into the void.

That was 15 months ago, and since that time Globalserve has been pivotal to international IT launches for organisations such as Robert Fleming and the BBC - business that Compel might otherwise not have got its hands on.

According to Joss, other customers are regularly being pointed in Compel's direction, thanks to the alliance. Systemhouse's loss was clearly Compel's gain. 'Globalserve has certainly allowed us to fulfil some of our customers' needs overseas. More importantly, there have been a whole raft of tenders over the past 12 months that we would not have been in a position to even bid for had we not had a global ability,' he says.

Joss admits, however, that many of these customers have yet to take up Compel's international capabilities: 'But it was a pre-condition in the tender, even if they have yet to take advantage of it,' he says.

Joss' belief that this kind of pre-tender condition reflects an overall change in the relationship between resellers and their main customers is borne out by research from PA Consulting. Its recent study of 6,000 UK directors reveals that organisations are adopting a strategic, international approach to sourcing, and this return to centralised procurement is having the greatest impact on their dealings with IT suppliers.

The study found that while only about 30 per cent of IT services are currently outsourced by organisations, most directors anticipate that this percentage will more than double by the next millennium, in line with corporate plans to expand, while not losing sight of core activities. This, in turn, is likely to lead to the outsourcing of non-core activities such as servicing PC desktops.

According to David Ballantyne, author of the report and a member of PA's management group, the knock-on effect of this will be a dramatic decline in the number of single suppliers fulfilling solitary contracts and a growth in joint venture agreements or those underpinned by supplier consortia.

'Organisations are increasingly looking to groups of specialists, or possibly a prime contractor, to take responsibility for a broader range of services and larger contracts than would otherwise be possible,' Ballantyne says.

He also dismisses any notions that only the large US firms are demanding that their suppliers have global fulfilment capabilities. In the UK alone in recent months, three blue-chip clients - a top bank, an oil company and a manufacturer - have all asked PA Consulting to find them a single supplier to meet their international IT needs. 'But I had to report back that there was no single supplier that could give them the breadth of coverage they were seeking,' says Ballantyne.

PA looked at various consortia as part of the tendering process, but they were unable to match the global capabilities of the top, one-stop-shop suppliers such as IBM.

All of which raises the question: why don't resellers band together more when big contracts are up for grabs, instead of leaving them to the likes of Big Blue and EDS?

Ballantyne has his own theories about this. He believes rival suppliers are innately distrustful of each other and will continue to be so. 'I don't think there's a lack of willingness to form alliances,' he says.

'What I think happens, though, is that there is a breakdown of trust before anything can be formalised.

'Suppliers are particularly concerned about not giving away strategic secrets - not so much costings, as most resellers have a rough idea of what others can buy the hardware for. But if they're planning to expand into another region, or are about to target a different type of customer, they don't want rivals to have access to that kind of information.'

It's this reluctance to co-operate that will ultimately nail many resellers to their own cross, Ballantyne believes. 'If suppliers can't respond globally, there's no doubt in my mind that they will be driven into niche markets - and ultimately go bust or be acquired by a larger predator,' he claims.

The message is not lost on Luke Reid, managing director of Cisco reseller Flintworks in Cirencester. Reid has recently campaigned, so far unsuccessfully, for other dealers to band together when it comes to global contracts.

But his beef is not only with the apathy of resellers generally, but the fact that when IBM or other big league suppliers are appointed as prime contractors, only their premier partners get a piece of the cake - even if they are not the best candidates for the job.

In one recent pitch for a contract in South America against a top US supplier, Reid reveals, the customer even admitted that his firm was superior in terms of price, service and delivery. But the US supplier inevitably got the contract, simply because of its size.

Equally frustrating for those who feel they are missing out is the fact that, where established reseller consortia exist, joining them - as in the case of many clubs - is frequently by invitation only. Moreover, those alliances that have any real clout can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

One of the oldest is the International Computer Group (ICG), headed by Computacenter. Other well-established alliances include Belgium's ASCL, whose UK representation is fronted by SCC. Together with Globalserve (Compel) and the Global Alliance Network (largely driven by Dutch-based Info'Products), the quartet account for the lion's share of consortium-based, international IT launches.

That said, there is a new kid on the block in the guise of IT International, set up in the past month, and whose UK and US reseller arm is Elcom. Why Elcom didn't join one of the existing alliances is a moot point, although the suspicion lurks that it might have been black-balled by its resellers' rivals.

Barrie Stanley, a former sales director at Elcom - who now acts as a consultant to IT International - contends, like Groucho Marx, that Elcom would not have joined any existing club that wanted it as a member anyway.

'I was charged with looking at whether we should join an alliance that was already established, but I couldn't find one that met the requirements our customers were looking for,' Stanley says. 'OK, the existing consortia had been around a long time - but perhaps too long.'

Was that another way of saying that Elcom perceived the existing alliances as failures? 'To an extent, I think they all are,' declares Stanley, without being drawn further.

But then Elcom's customers are rooted largely in financial institutions on both sides of the pond - typically merchant banks which will order 300 PCs at a throw in a combined service contract worth $2 million to $3 million.

It's here that IT International hopes to score, having joined in a consortium with similarly minded resellers in Benelux, France, Scandinavia and Germany, while still remaining open to participation from resellers in the Far East. To avoid the risk of internal squabbling between the members over who gets what share of the spoils, the various resellers have held lengthy meetings at least half a dozen times in recent months.

One measure they have all agreed on is that, by next year, all members will have access to a uniform, online database of hardware and service prices so that customers are guaranteed a seamless procurement process, regardless of geographical launch.

'Price sensitivity and rivalry between suppliers has always been a big problem for customers when they try to source,' maintains Stanley. 'But IT International will overcome that by keeping all the base costs uniform and openly pooled between members.'

IT International's members boast a collective turnover of about $1.7 billion, and they are confident that once their global capability is fully acknowledged, that figure will rise to $3 billion by the first quarter of next year. But it remains to be seen if the members can make any real inroads on the ICG alliance, whose collective revenues easily outstrip those of any other group, if only because of the towering presence of Computacenter.

As one of those on the receiving end of jibes that existing consortia are too long in the tooth to hack it, Computacenter's head of corporate marketing, Phil Williams, dismisses any suggestion that the alliance is falling apart. 'It's totally untrue,' he insists, pointing to the fact that while ICG's original ownership has changed since it was set up in 1989, it has nevertheless expanded to embrace more than 30 resellers operating across 40 countries.

'Any organisation undergoes change over a period of 10 years and, if anything, ICG has grown stronger because of the way it has evolved,' he says.

Nor, insists Williams, is there any squabbling between the reseller members over pricing. This is largely thanks to the fact that ICG has regionally located troubleshooters to work out the finer details of any global deal.

According to Joss, disputes between consortium members over how, say, PC prices should be internationally agreed, is rarely an issue anyway.

The customer maintains close dialogue with the original hardware manufacturers when planning its global launch.

'Usually, what happens is that the customer will have a fairly direct discussion with Compaq, IBM or whoever, and what we work out between all of us is the global pricing of products. Only after that do members work out their own markups, based on the variables of each location. Otherwise, we are able to offer consistent pricing on core products and services.'

So just how worthwhile has the Globalserve connection been to Compel in pure revenue terms? Joss admits: 'It represents less than five per cent of Compel's turnover at the moment, though it's still early days.

But in terms of cost to us, Globalserve brings in enough revenue to cover the cost of the resources we apply and we haven't really had to spend very much on advertising.'

This means that fees to participating resellers can be kept to a minimum and in keeping with the size of their operation - 'just a few thousand pounds, usually'.

Joss adds: 'Our real motive for getting into Globalserve was as a defensive mechanism against rival alliances such as ICG. But I don't think many customers are putting together true global deals yet. I doubt whether more than 20 or 30 firms of the top 500 worldwide have yet launched a global deal.'

Not yet, maybe. But the writing is on the wall. Be warned.