The times they are a changing

Most of us don't think about strategy. It's all too easy to be distracted and become responsive, to try to do too many things and end up doing none of them very well. Channel companies are having to face up to this reality the role of the reseller is changing.

Computacenter is not a company you'd expect to run into trouble, and its recent results confirmed that it's in very rude health - for one important reason - it is changing. It has invested heavily in services, expanding its group and maintenance business.

While Computacenter will continue to take the fulfilment business, the other non-core jobs will be done by someone else. Even big resellers are starting to outsource the sectors they're not good at and fill in areas where they are weak through acquisition.

Earlier this year, we saw GE sign a global deal in which Computer 2000 will provide the logistics services for the reseller's corporate fulfilment business.

Similar deals have been done further up the channel too. IBM has struck a global fulfilment deal with Tech Data under which the distributor will carry out just about all the vendor's PC logistics work.

Other role changes are taking place among resellers all over the UK and at every level. Lynx Technology has been transforming into a services organisation and will be appointed a systems delivery partner for Compaq.

Lynx is becoming an applications development agency for the vendor, aiming to put packages onto the company's boxes in partnership with third-party ISVs. This will mean the company can work with other third parties to deliver specialist products. It will provide the integration skills and logistics.

Honeyframe Computer Services - a relatively small but growing reseller - is fulfiling some corporate PC business for Unisys, offering project management, training and maintenance services on the back.

More resellers and distributors are working at the same level as vendors, instead of down stream from them - doing what they do best and letting others do the rest. This has been forced on the market but it's the system that makes most sense.

Resellers are having to accept change, re-focus on their core businesses and form real partnerships with suppliers as well as customers.

Charles Darwin said it's not the strongest or the cleverest of species that survives, but the one that adapts most successfully to change. Not all resellers are responding rapidly enough to the changes taking place - to the rise in direct sales, to the increasing domination of the leading vendors and distributors, and to ecommerce.

I would question whether even Computacenter is doing enough about these changes. Many resellers remain conspicuous by their inactivity these days - they are doing nothing and waiting, it seems, for the year 2000 to come and go and for the market to wake up again. But next year's market will be different from the one we have been used to over the past few years.

Relying on a nostalgic return to the good old days simply won't be good enough.