Why this reseller has built out its own global channel

Viadex sees partner programme contribute one third of its gross profit in last financial year

Surbiton-based reseller Viadex has built out a channel model to help integrators cater for customers in overseas territories.

Viadex launched its Global Partner Programme in 2017, with a view to helping partners with limited capabilities in some regions to take a greater share of their customers' global IT spend.

CEO Dino Cooper said that in its last financial year, the partner model contributed around five per cent of the firm's overall revenue, but around one third of the firm's £6.1m gross profit.

The programme works by connecting partners (Viadex customers) with IT firms in regions where they don't have a strong enough presence to serve a customer sufficiently.

Cooper said Viadex has found its customers to be largely global systems integrators (SI) looking to plug caps in far-afield territories.

"Those Fortune 500 clients, largely speaking, have a strong embedded SI relationship and they would rather everything is taken care of by one entity," he said.

"The challenge for the SIs is that when they look for a partner to help them, the ones that have in-country presence at scale are often seen as competitors and a threat to their business. A North American wouldn't partner with Dimension Data to take care of Africa and Asia, for example.

"By working with top- and middle-tier US partners, we have been augmenting their service capability in some of the hardest parts of the world so they can transact, support, be compliant and claim back local taxes where appropriate. We support their deployment beyond the top trading countries in the world, where it is quite simple."

Cooper said that as more businesses become global entities they will increasingly demand that their IT suppliers have presences in countries they wouldn't typically have done so.

The clients themselves will not want to transact directly with a supplier in each country because that would mean working with countless firms across the world, Cooper explained.

The role Viadex plays via its programme is linking the partner with smaller, local players.

He said that the model has not generally received much interest from other resellers, who view Viadex as a competitor that may poach their clients.

Cooper claimed that the way the channel is set up makes it incredibly complex for large SIs to fulfil global deals.

"The channels are broken, certainly at the top tier with the largest disties that are interested only in volume," he said.

"The guy who runs the UK arm is interested in the UK. His contract with Cisco etc says his contract is in that region, but they will regularly help UK resellers win global bids.

"The partner then automatically assumes that because the distie is global it can deploy globally, but their contract [with the vendor] doesn't allow them to do that.

"They, as a large corporate, can't run an exception and then it becomes incredibly complex.

"[Distributors] are constantly being asked to help partners join the dots based on what clients want but because of the way the channel is constructed, you are blocked. What you would presume to be quite simple is not. That is at its worst with the biggest vendors."

The Viadex model aims to help address this issue by connecting global firms with local partners who can do the in-country business on their behalf.

The make-up of the programme is slightly different to how Cooper had anticipated, in that he had expected the majority of UK-based customers to want to buy entirely in their home region, and deploy from their HQ.

"We thought that a lot of UK enterprise clients would happily procure everything in the UK and then we would deliver to the sites in every part of the globe for them," he said.

"We have found that the majority of them don't mind that in regions like Europe, but as it gets more complex they would rather just have a local supplier deal with it - but they don't want to engage with 80 local suppliers. [With Viadex] you can have a partner do it for you and deliver it through partners.

"It seems like it would be complex with margins on top of margins, but you have to pick and choose your clients.

"If everything is about price and the client doesn't see the value in having one partner, then we can't deal with them as a client."