Estate management in advance
Distributors and partners should team up to improve estate management for customers, argues Ben Abraham
I think it is time for the channel to think beyond maintenance renewals in terms of IT estate management. Including end-of-life equipment management, software, configuration, storage requirements and green technology offerings within estate or asset management represent a real opportunity that may be missed.
Consultancy around the risk of software licensing or contractual contravention is currently seen as a specialist service. But viewing hardware and software assets as a whole may help prevent niche competitors moving in on your customers.
Recent years have seen servers, software, storage and associated hardware platforms bought ad-hoc by individual departments or subsidiaries to support business processes. When you consider that there may also be server, storage and desktop virtualisation to consider, an overall view of the IT estate may have been lost.
I think the channel should take a more proactive approach here.
Pulling all the necessary data together to identify end-of-life kit or potential carbon footprint reduction is not easy. If it were, end-user customers would have done it themselves.
Combining duplicate vendor, distribution and reseller sold-out data to identify potential savings on the cost of power, heating, floor space and the like is something that organisations typically find themselves unable to capture – and the larger the organisation, the bigger the problem, as IT estates can be spread across multiple sites and entities.
Everyone recognises this is a complex process. Distribution holds the data that can enable standardisation for the channel here.
Unified data at distribution level can unlock a treasure trove of hardware and software upgrades or renewals. This will give the ability to slice and dice data and means that business partners could talk to customers about multiple areas in their IT estate.
You could, for example, promote a new project that combines a software upgrade with the replacement of old or inefficient servers. This may save customers money, while increasing performance and productivity.
End-user customers rarely have the time or ability to identify inefficiencies in their own systems or even realise there may be an issue. Therefore, proactive recommendations at the right time should be well received.
Furthermore, business partners are not currently advised of renewal notices until their maintenance contract is just about to expire (or has even done so). If another company has been in conversation with that customer, they may be in a good position to take the associated revenue.
This should be a lesson to the whole channel to be involved earlier in sales cycles, monitoring renewals and IT resources in a proactive and holistic way. And it can be made possible by aggregating data and presenting that information to business partners.
I think at least six months notice is needed, to enable partners to present a business case for a technology refresh. The traditional 30-days notice is not enough.
End-user customers may also benefit by having just the one trusted business partner to work with, not least because only the incumbent would have access to their data.
Of course, I think distributors are well positioned to collate and interrogate the customer data required here – and we are investing in the technology needed to make it happen. Resultant services opportunities around any upgrades could be offered in partnership with the distributor, with benefits accruing to all.
Ben Abraham is UK services divisional leader at Avnet Technology Solutions