'VARs don't see a return for 18 months' - why distributors are failing resellers on emerging tech

Distributor moves closer to launching London incubator, with London premises secured

Distributors are failing emerging vendors looking to set up in the UK by not offering a true incubation service, according to Progress Distribution boss John Quinn.

Quinn secured premises for his new tech incubator The Tech Cube last week, which is slated to launch towards the end of this year.

The premises, in the City of London, is spread over three floors and will give vendors office space and access to additional sales and marketing services from Progress, for a subscription fee of around £2,000 a month.

"Typically they're not changing and they're not moving forward. It's a cliché, but the reason that we're called Progress is because we're making progress.

"The broadliners don't touch the end user, they simply do channel enablement. 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.

"With our sales programme we get that value literally from month one. I can bring an opportunity to one of our VARs where they haven't seen the business."

As part of the incubation service, vendors can purchase both internal and external sales services from Progress, priced at £3,000 a month and £7,000 a month respectively, giving them "a ready-made sales team".

Quinn said that Progress has just closed out its record month, and is currently operating at a margin of around 30 per cent with its portfolio of disruptive vendors.

Progress' vendor portfolio includes the likes of Cybereason, Dathena and Avecto.

As well as the services on offer, Quinn explained, The Tech Cube will give vendors moving into the UK a base from which to work, rather than operating out of hotels or only coming on trips for days at a time.

He said the service will be unparalleled, even by the specialist security distributors in the UK, which he said offer no real incubation services.

"You can talk to anybody who thinks they're an incubator of security technology and not one of them has the infrastructure in place that we do," he said. "They outsource it. They say to a vendor 'give us £10,000 and we'll make 20 appointments'. That's all they do.

"That's not cohesive business, and then they expect the VARs to create business opportunities because they've got the best technology. That is not a business opportunity that works.

"VARs do not accept it when you turn up and say 'this is the best thing since sliced bread' because they see that 10 times a day and they're just not interested."