Nothing more at face value

Fujitsu Forum 2012 in Munich saw VARs and other tech providers encouraged to become even more specialised across a range of niches

The top-line channel announcement from Fujitsu's annual rest-of-world talkfest in Munich was of its new fourth Select partner programme tier, currently dubbed the Value Channel. The vendor believes the future and its associated revenue lies in increased collaboration between more specialised partners - which it is looking to recruit in ever greater numbers.

Hans-Dieter Wysuwa, senior vice president of the product sales group at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, granted CRN an exclusive interview on the vendor's sales and channel strategy at the event. Eighty per cent of the company's European revenue is earned via the channel.

"That has been a very sustained, and sustainable, model for many years," Wysuwa said. "And it is robust, and focused, for the vast majority, on B2B opportunities. We [also] have a very tiny piece of B2C in our DNA, and that happens from time to time for overstock capacity and so on."

As reported on ChannelWeb, the so-called Select Value Channel designation is focused on nurturing longer-term customer relationships that drive sales of high-end offerings to the mid-market and enterprise customers, such as Primergy, Eternus and SAP HANA appliances in cloud, storage, solutions and the datacentre. Membership is by invitation only.

Partners will receive additional skills development, mentoring, and market development resources as well as other kinds of support. "The company's new Value Channel initiative will drive profitable businesses by meeting the specific needs of their most important customers," Fujitsu said in a statement.

Austria, France, Germany and Spain have already been invited to join the top tier. Some 30 VARs were invited to the official launch and briefing at Fujitsu Forum 2012. The rest of EMEA, including the UK, is expected to be rolled into the programme next year.

According to Wysuwa, though, the Value Channel may take a different form in the UK because some elements are already offered to UK partners. There is no timeframe for the fourth tier's launch in the UK yet, he added.

He also confirmed that the vendor believes the key to continuing sustainability across its distribution channel is for resellers to specialise more. So Fujitsu, as well as desiring more channel partners generally, wants to see more partners move into tier three, the so-called Select Expert (Specialised) designation.

No other road to value

"The world has become so complex that you can only go one way: business specialisation. There is no one who can do, say, VDI and storage and data protection. No one company can provide it all. So it must go more in the direction of answering the question of how are you [tech companies and partners] going to collaborate in future," Wysuwa told CRN. "So I believe in collaboration, I believe in networks, on a modern scale, for the future."

When asked where he thought the best revenue opportunities for resellers would be over the next two or three years, Wysuwa said he was not a gambling man.

"If I could predict that, I would go and phone my broker and I would become a rich man," he laughed. "And I don't want to fall into the trap of naming the same things as everyone else; I don't want to say those common words, such as ‘cloud' or ‘big data'. But I think where partners could produce a lot of money is data protection.

"The more data we collect, the more serious the data protection becomes."

He went on to add that Windows 8, in his view, will also be important for many in the channel - it will not be another Vista and simply leapfrogged over in favour of the next OS, or ignored while organisations stick with Windows 7.

Again, this is tied into collaboration. In Wysuwa's opinion, people in general are not going to ditch all their gadgets for one device, although they will want more and more of the gadgets they use to "talk" to each other for one reason or another - something where Windows 8 has new mobility capability that can assist.

Resellers should also watch out for a cloud service for partners, rolling out first in central Europe, that could provide opportunities for smaller partners without the infrastructure to get into that business, he noted.

Wysuwa's main piece of advice to the channel about the problems of margins and profit, however, was more down to earth than most vendor partners might offer.

"Partners will go nuts if they try to listen to all the different marketing strategies, from 10 different vendors. So I think you should be very self-directed. For those things where you do not make money, there is only one logical answer: leave it. Of course it can also happen that you can lose or break even in a certain profit area but generate a lot of margin and profit on your maintenance and services - but do not fall into the trap that many vendors do. Ask: can we be profitable with our customers end to end, or not?" concluded Wysuwa.

Bring in the new

Rod Vawdrey, corporate senior vice president and president of international business at Fujitsu, told media at the event that although sales at Fujitsu had been flat, the company was still on track to grow revenue 40 per cent in coming years -- although he conceded that the timetable to achieve that growth had been extended. Nor would he be drawn on when the growth figure would actually be achieved.

"We have extended our timeframe but we have not lost sight of our goal," he said. "We are growing nine per cent year on year already this year, with a five per cent operating margin."

The firm had virtually completed its transition to a services-led business, although it had not given up on hardware, he indicated. Some 30 per cent of Fujitsu's revenue by 2015 would come from cloud services, and the company has become especially focused on the opportunities in emerging markets including Russia, the Middle East and Africa, Vawdrey said.

"Ninety per cent of the world's organisations will be using some form of cloud services by 2015. That is an amazing trajectory," he noted.

The 2012 event -- the vendor's only other outside the main mid-May show in Tokyo -- was larded heavily with references to several new offerings.

These included:

*FlexFrame Orchestrator for managing unified SAP environments;

*Fujitsu Personal Cloud, which will use the vendor's global cloud platform to deliver apps and data to a range of end-user devices;

*the X line of all-in-one desktops, thin clients and displays with touchscreen functionality; and

*Eco Track, a cloud service that will help companies audit themselves to comply with the oncoming European Union Energy Efficiency Directive -- although it does not actually harvest or analyse data from, say, actual sensors that monitor energy use.

As well as promising improvements to collaboration and productivity on a globalised stage, many of these offerings would help customers save money, according to Vawdrey.

"We are in an interesting era that is seeing an expansion in social computing. We have a need for huge amounts of efficient storage and new ways to analyse and explore this data. Then there is the expansion of mobility and mobile devices and smartphones, tablets and collaborative networks," Vawdrey (pictured, left) added.

Channel-specific sessions included a talk on how to develop customers' server and storage infrastructures, an exposition of the global cloud offering partner opportunity, the role for SAP HANA architecture in smaller customer organisations, and how to take advantage of a reshaped modern workplace. According to Fujitsu's Wysuwa, 40 UK partners attended the conference.