Former VIP man Stevinson unveils new venture
Dave Stevinson is targeting channel firms with new analytics consultancy, GNR
Former VIP Computers director Dave Stevinson has bounced back with a new consultancy focused on selling business intelligence and analytics software to channel firms.
After resigning his directorship of components distributor VIP in September, Stevinson spent a few months with his family and indulging in his hobbies of real tennis and rackets.
Stevinson (pictured) is back with a new consultancy, GNR, whose mission is to free the channel firms he has worked with over his 20-year career from "spreadsheet anarchy", working in partnership with analytics vendors Strategy Companion and QlikView.
Despite their position at the vanguard of emerging technologies, many vendors, distributors and resellers have not moved beyond Excel when analysing data, Stevinson claimed.
"In the channel, so many people are working off flat reports from yesterday's data," he said.
Stevinson said his services would be perfectly suited to a vendor, distributor or reseller struggling to analyse which customers are profitable to their business and which are not. He has designed specific dashboards based on key performance indicators commonly used by channel staff, including ones relating to how they are tracking against vendor targets, the operational efficiency of sales reps and freight recovery rates.
"The data is fed to you continuously so you can improve efficiencies and do not have to spend time writing reports – the reports come to you," he added.
Stevinson said Strategy Companion and QlikView, which it is buying from QlikView partner Differentia Consulting, are more affordable than the big "stack" vendors such as Oracle, IBM and SAP.
"They are much cheaper, quicker to install and give much quicker return on investment," he said.
Big data is currently being talked about but not adopted, Stevinson added, but he predicted that social network sentiment analysis would take off among vendors and consumer-focused resellers in the years to come.