50 quotes which tell the story of the channel in 2017
The year that was in the words of those involved in the IT industry and its channel
"I've certainly made thousands of mistakes along the way and I probably would have gone faster in terms of diversifying our portfolio. And I probably would have gone faster in opening up our branch network. But overall it's been a pretty good journey."
Outbound Softcat CEO Martin Hellawell
"We are in a digital transformation era, and I think history will remember the period 2017 to 2020 just like we view the Stone Age and Bronze Age. It's going to change our lives, and the new generation will have a different concept of the quality of life they will live and what information they will have." Centerprise founder Rafi Razzak reflects on the pace of change in the industry.
"The cashflow issues were brought about predominantly by credit insurers reducing credit limits and HMRC deciding that the informal [payment] agreement didn't work for them and forcing our hand onto a payment. The two combined just meant we had no choice but to put the company into administration."
Misco CEO Alan Cantwell tells CRN that entering the firm into administration was the only option.
"I think this is an isolated incident. In general resellers are doing pretty well at the moment. If you're struggling at the moment you need to look in the mirror."
Mike Norris (left), chief executive of Computacenter on the demise of Misco.
"Here at Currys PC World Business, the news that Misco UK has ceased trading has been met with sadness. For the many dedicated Misco employees this will be a hugely distressing situation. Similarly, the closure of Misco will undoubtedly impact many of their customers - especially those that have been awaiting an order to arrive to allow them to continue to operate their own business. As the UK's biggest technology specialist, we're here to help both Misco's employees and customers during this difficult time."
A Currys PC World Business advert expresses its "sadness" over the demise of Misco as it looks to poach its customers.
"Normally I do not comment on rumors [sic], but the speculation about my future and Uber has become a distraction. So let me make this as clear as I can. I am fully committed to HPE and plan to remain the company's CEO. I am fully committed to HPE and plan to remain the company's CEO." After being linked with the Uber CEO role, HPE boss Meg Whitman took to Twitter in July to reaffirm her commitment to the vendor…
"Now is the right time for Antonio [Neri] and a new generation of leaders to take the reins of HPE. I have tremendous confidence that they will continue to build a great company that will thrive well into the future." Meg Whitman in November as she hands the HPE reigns over to Antonio Neri.
"It's the chance of a lifetime from a professional standpoint. In essence I got to watch Meg [Whitman] work - not just Meg but the senior leadership of the company - for three years. I was a fly on the wall." Working as Meg Whitman's chief of staff was "the chance of a lifetime", Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) channel boss Paul Hunter told CRN.
"Labour voters will be made redundant first if Labour do win and things slow down."
The managing director of reseller Storm Technologies, John Brooker, and the "tongue-in-cheek" email he sent to staff advising them to vote for the Conservatives.
"Ninety-nine per cent of our customers have messaged in and spoke to us last night saying thanks so much for our response to the outage. I've just fed my team because I've just come back in this morning and about 35 to 40 of them did a 25-hour shift because there are still bits and pieces that needed doing."
UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones responds after the firm's datacentre outage earlier this month.
Continues on next page...
50 quotes which tell the story of the channel in 2017
The year that was in the words of those involved in the IT industry and its channel
"This is legal thing. It's a legal thing with some technology - not a primarily technology thing. Our first look at it isn't 'where is all this extra technology we can sell?' I hate to say it, but our first conversation is 'Christ, we're going to need to talk to the lawyers to figure out what we can do, what we can't do, what advice we can give and what advice we can't give'."
CAE Technology managing director Justin Harling on the 2017 hot-topic of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
"There is absolutely an opportunity out there, and although they're right in a sense that GDPR is not about technology and is a business problem, you cannot be compliant with GDPR without having technology in place. It can't be done."
IDC associate vice president Duncan Brown as the analyst finds GDPR will fuel $3.7bn in extra IT security sales for vendors and the channel by 2020.
"The recent cyber-attacks on Parliament and the NHS show what a serious matter this is. The Met is working towards upgrading its software but in its current state it's like a fish swimming in a pool of sharks. It is vital the Met is given the resources to step up its upgrade timeline before we see another cyber-attack with nationwide security implications."
London Assembly member Steve O'Connell after it is unveiled that more than 18,000 Metropolitan Police computers are still running Windows XP.
"Resellers should stop paying sales commissions immediately. If you pay for results, you get less - fact."
Channel consultant Dominic Monkhouse and his controversial view on reseller sales commissions.
"My opinion is that the channel is overpopulated with layers and layers of management. Channel partners are having to adjust their strategy and streamline their management to get more people on the street fighting for business. Being a middle manager is a dangerous place to be at the moment." Channel recruiter Marc Sumner claimed channel firms are looking for "more people on the street" instead of middle-level managers.
"Sadly we're training too few digital leaders and too many bog-standard IT staff, without the proper skills to meet the challenges and opportunities of the digital revolution." Grace Blakeley, researcher at think tank IPPR North, accuses the government of being detached from the needs of employers and of failing to address the skills gap in the UK.
"We have been looking for an acquisition for quite some time in order to bolster the scale of our operation and the profitability of the UK group. Phoenix really suited our aspirations."
Neil Murphy, group managing director of Bytes UK as the firm acquired Microsoft reseller Phoenix Software to form a £400m a year-plus operation.
"I would rather be an owner of Getronics than of a gold mine."
Getronics' new CEO Nana Baffour on the IT services firm.
"Honesty will go miles: I will recommend you to everyone left, right and centre if you're honest with me, and say 'don't buy this, why don't you do this'. We'll sing your praises." Nick Ioannou, head of IT at architect Ratcliffe Groves Partnership, at the inaugural European Channel Leadership Forum on what he is looking for from an IT suppliers.
"They recruit the VARs and they talk about the new tech but the adoption from the VARs is extremely slow because they don't see return on investment for a good 12 to 18 months."
Distributors were failing emerging vendors looking to set up in the UK by not offering a true incubation service, according to Progress Distribution boss John Quinn.
Continues on next page...
50 quotes which tell the story of the channel in 2017
The year that was in the words of those involved in the IT industry and its channel
"There are a lot of changes happening in the market. We are seeing a big move towards cloud, and as an independent distributor it is difficult to make the investment in platforms that is necessary." Commtech CEO Justin Owens claims smaller disties are struggling to make the necessary cloud investment.
"It's unprecedented for a company with limited tenure like AWS, at just 11 and a half years old. It's unparalleled as a paradigm from any other technology shift we've ever seen in history, so it's a pretty good indicator that cloud is the new normal."
Amazon Web Services' (AWS) growth is unlike anything seen in the tech sector before, according to UK managing director Gavin Jackson.
"Cloud has enabled a greater level of transparency as far as the supply chain is concerned. That greater transparency does mean that we have as much skin in the game with the partner's success as the partner does itself. The experience that the end customer has is no longer just about the particular partner they've bought from. If that partner doesn't deliver, it has a knock-on effect and impacts other partners in the supply chain and the overall provider of the public cloud, whichever hyper-scale provider that is."
Ingram Micro Cloud's northern Europe VP Apay Obang-Oyway tells CRN that cloud has brought more transparency to the supply chain.
"What we're seeing at the moment is that we really want to make sure - whether it's as the big four or part of the big three - is that we are known as one of the fastest-growing scale cloud companies in the world."
Oracle's rapid cloud growth has put it in the same league as industry leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, according to UK and Ireland channel boss Simon Hill.
"I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts. We are developing custom AI hardware chips. Jim [a well-known chip engineer] is developing specialised AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world."
Despite making a series of disparaging comments about the threat of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Tesla's Elon Musk reportedly told party attendees at the intelligence conference NIPS that the company is developing its own custom chips for its driverless cars.
"Women are going to be very powerful in the 21st century. Because last century people compared about muscle [but] this century people compare about wisdom. Hire as many women possible. This is what we did, and this is the secret sauce."
Alibaba founder Jack Ma on the importance of women in the industry.
"We set up, and the UK voted for Brexit."
Group managing director Michael O'Hara of Irish distributor Data Solutions admitting its first year in the UK was challenging.
"We are looking for someone who is able to drive the business forward and bring some new energy and thinking to the organisation. I don't think it's in our interests to find a clone of me."
Softcat CEO Martin Hellawell on the hunt this year to find his replacement.
"I am absolutely delighted to be joining Softcat. It is a significant customer of Tech Data and I have therefore seen at close quarters its remarkable growth based on a great team providing outstanding service to a rapidly growing customer base."
Former Tech Data boss Graeme Watt after being the answer to Softcat's search for that new CEO.
"Is the business card dead? I was an industry event yesterday and not a single person we spoke to had a card with them, which is a first."
Jonathan Dolby, marketing director of Microlise, pondered on LinkedIn if the age of the business card is over after a recent industry event.
Continues on next page...
50 quotes which tell the story of the channel in 2017
The year that was in the words of those involved in the IT industry and its channel
"One of the things that we've seen in the combination [of Dell and EMC] is this idea that customers actually don't want to have more partners - they want fewer [vendor] partners."
Dell founder Michael Dell ramped up his consolidation evangelist act by insisting that customers want fewer vendor partners.
"We remain an independent company. I don't work for Michael [Dell], I work for the board of directors. We remain an independent legal company with our own route to market."
Speaking at VMworld Europe in Barcelona, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger talked down the control that parent company Dell has over the vendor.
"There have been instances where as a direct organisation and a channel organisation we have had challenges. Our approach is very black and white, though. If a partner has a deal registration in place and that deal registration is comprised by our direct business, we have a zero-tolerance policy." After launching its partner programme in February, Sarah Shields, vice president and general manager for Dell EMC's channel in UK and Ireland, told CRN it would getting tough on channel conflict.
"[Partners] weren't making money and neither were we, so that was a recipe for disaster. We cut sales, we cut marketing, I cut G&A, everything - including R&D in places - but I've also reinvested where it needed to be done."
SonicWall CEO Bill Conner said the security vendor has gone "back to its roots" after a difficult spell under Dell ownership that forced it to take cost-cutting measures and play catch up with the industry.
"After three and a half years we really have turned around the perception and the understanding of our company. People have asked me to change [our] name, from BlackBerry to something else. People have asked me to do more advertising [as well], but the thing is our consistency, and our team going out there day after day and getting our message out there, is starting to pay off."
BlackBerry CEO John Chen was urged to change the vendor's name as it moved from its heritage hardware model to focus solely on software.
"We have nothing to hide. We're sharing everything that we have - it's all in the public domain and we'll continue to share that information."
Kaspersky's UK general manager Adam Maskatiya moved to reassure UK partners as the vendor's entanglement with the US government continued. The Department of Homeland Security had ordered government departments to remove all Kaspersky products within 90 days because of alleged ties with the Russian government.
"We used to talk about getting a PC in every home and in every desk as our mission. Even by the late nineties, at least in the developed world, we had more or less achieved that, and after that it was a bit unclear - what is our purpose? So that was what I thought was important to start asking in 2014, it's quite an existential question, why does Microsoft exist?"
Micorsoft CEO Satya Nadella on how he had to "rediscover Microsoft's soul".
"I stood on this very stage last year talking about transformation and change. We asked you to change and you did, and then we didn't notice."
Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president at Microsoft admits that the vendor in the past has been guilty of asking its partners to ready themselves for digital transformation but, from a sales point of view, had not done so itself.
"Microsoft will exit the Surface business by 2019. It doesn't make sense for them to be in this business. And when the capital expenditure challenge that Satya Nadella is taking Microsoft down becomes visible to Wall Street… he will have a lot of cost cutting to do, and Surface will be the first target."
Canalys CEO Steve Brazier made a controversial claim at the EMEA Canalys Channels Forum in Venice.
"We weren't doing a great job of working with our channel partners to build an ecosystem that would benefit both them and us. One of my goals for 2017 was, in some places, building the channel organisation and, in some places, repairing relationships that have been stressed over previous years for a variety of reasons."
Bill Robbins, EVP of worldwide sales at FireEye on the security vendor's failings with the channel.
50 quotes which tell the story of the channel in 2017
The year that was in the words of those involved in the IT industry and its channel
"Probably the best piece of marketing advertisement for an MSP in the last decade."
Dave Sobel, a channel executive from SolarWinds MSP on May's Wannacry event - a massive ransomware attack felt around the world.
"I'm so sorry; I tried so hard to make this work."
Dave Stevinson, Entatech MD, after going out of business after last-gasp efforts to sell the distributor failed.
"It has been a tremendous honour to serve in multiple leadership roles at Cisco [and] to build one of the most successful and admired companies in the world. One that in many ways changed the way the world truly works, lives, plays, and learns. It is time for Cisco to move on to its next generation of leadership including at the board and chairman level and to position this seamlessly for the future."
Former Cisco CEO John Chambers on leaving the networking juggernaut at the end of the year, drawing a 26-year Cisco career to a close.
"We really didn't know how committed [to the channel] we should be back then, but today we know for sure."
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins uses his partner summit keynote to admit that the importance of the channel was not clear at first.
"It's so easy to be patronised in this business. We will do our best to understand [encryption]. We will take advice from other people but I do feel that there is a sea of criticism for any of us who try and legislate in new areas, who will automatically be sneered at and laughed at for not getting it right. I don't need to understand how encryption works to understand how it's helping - end-to-end encryption - the criminals. I will engage with the security services to find the best way to combat that."
Speaking at a Spectator event, home Secretary Amber Rudd targets technology experts.
"It's allowed us to be more focused on where those pockets of growth are and allowed us to be clear in which market segments we want to serve. I don't think we would have seen the same level of innovation and the same level of product launches if we hadn't done this."
UK managing director George Brasher claims HP Inc has been able to innovate and release products at a quicker rate since it split from HPE in 2015.
"We found that there was no single source to find, recruit and engage with partners, which is why we developed Channeliser from scratch. It's like LinkedIn, but it's for the IT industry."
Jacqui Rand, who alongside Anne Lambton, unveiled plans to link up 15 per cent of the global IT community through their new platform, Channeliser.
"The statement is true that we have an increasing number of partners that are working with AWS. But I think the rationale that this is an AWS-centric activity that we would initiate because we want to sell more stuff is not the reason we are doing it."
AWS' technology evangelist, Ian Massingham, dismisses the notion that it is using the channel as a vehicle to scale its business.
"If those sales people are from a certain box-shifting background, they cannot make that transition. Especially around managed services, that's the one they cannot get their head around."
Kevin Goodall, European managing director at channel consultancy EEC Services, on why specialist sales staff are needed to move from box-shifting reseller to managed services VAR.
"The price activity and manic sentiment that led to present prices have dwarfed even the Tulip mania of nearly 400 years ago."
Analyst Elliott Prechter on the Bitcoin craze.