DataCore insists new services arm will not pinch VAR sales

Vendor claims new Services Group will benefit VARs with limited resources but will not eat into resellers' coffers

Storage vendor DataCore has insisted its newly launched EMEA Professional Services Group (PSG) will not cannibalise resellers' business.

The new division aims to sell specialist consulting and troubleshooting services to customers via resellers – specifically those with limited DataCore resources or expertise.

The vendor insisted it would not take the services offerings to customers direct and that the PSG's establishment was based on strong channel demand, which had built up over three years.

The offering will include health-checking assessment technology as well as migration services, performance analysis and VMware integration advice.

The PSG will be headed up by Glen Bullingham, the firm's newly appointed director of professional services, who said that his firm has no desire to steal the lunch of its partners.

"Our strategy is not to take the channel's bread and butter direct," he said. "It won't be sold direct to end users, only through the channel.

"We have made an aggressive push in partner recruitment which has given us excellent touch with new customer opportunities. Some of those [new resellers] have limited resources and our objective is... to focus on enablement."

Despite what Bullingham described as strong demand for the services, he said he expects only between 10 to 15 per cent of its resellers to take DataCore up on its services offering, particularly those VARs new to the vendor.

"The channel will always make more money delivering [services] on their own," he said. "There is a fixed price list and tariffs for services and margin for selling those.

"They will make more money by providing their own professional services. However, we know they simply don't all have the resource for that. Instead of having no bite of the pie, they would rather have reduced margin and close the sale than have nothing whatsoever...

"We don't want the perception going out that we're cannibalising our own partners' opportunities."