Prolinx leaves NSSA framework, saying it has lost relevance

But university consortium organising it disagrees, claiming support for server and storage framework has grown

Public sector reseller Prolinx has walked away from the National Server and Storage Agreement (NSSA), arguing that the framework had become less important in the eyes of its higher and further education customers - a charge NSSA's organisers have denied.

Following a review by vendor partner EMC, Prolinx has agreed "by mutual consent" with the storage giant to relinquish its berth on the framework, the current iteration of which was recently extended for nine months until 31 July 2016.

Talking to CRN, Prolinx sales director Simon Blackburn argued the NSSA was becoming increasingly less relevant to his university and college customers.

"We have had discussions with EMC regarding the NSSA framework and BT will be replacing us on it," he confirmed.

"The framework is quite rigid. It offers servers in one Lot and storage in another, but people are looking for IT services incorporating all of it. They are using other frameworks such as Technology Services and G-Cloud or running their own frameworks over three to five years, which gives them more flexibility."

When the NSSA was last renewed in November 2012 it was billed as a £50m-a-year vehicle but Blackburn said Prolinx's sales through the framework had declined.

"The NSSA is becoming less and less important to them [customers], hence why our revenues have declined significantly on this framework and revenues from other frameworks have gone up. It's not as crucial to us as it was three or four years ago."

However, this was not a view shared by the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC), which runs the NSSA on behalf of six university consortia.

It stated: "SUPC has not been formally notified of any reseller changes to the National Server and Storage Agreement (NSSA), so is unable to comment further. However, they can confirm that support from the Higher Education sector for this agreement has grown and continues to do so."

An EMC representative confirmed that Prolinx won't be part of its NSSA reseller line-up for the remainder of its term, but denied that BT's appointment as its replacement had been finalised.

"They are a great partner, but they decided the model didn't suit them," they said.

"We are currently working out which partner is going to fill their place."
EMC is one of seven manufacturers on the storage Lot of NSSA alongside Dell, Dot Hill, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, IBM and XMA.

As a manfacturer-led framework, the NSSA allows each manufacturer to work with four reseller partners, with EMC's three others being MTI, S3 and Esteem.