Benefits from big data within the VAR

Simon Ellis says the new business analytics opportunities could also be applied to great benefit within the channel

Imagine a world where your sales force receives real-time customer opportunities derived from your own data, where opportunities that improve your top and bottom line also lead to new service and product business, improved renewal rates and deeper insight into customer estates.

It could be argued that it is the channel itself that could benefit a lot more from business analytics, given their varied (and traditionally spreadsheet-based) new business, renewal management and customer asset management.

Many asset management offerings remain siloed – contracts managed in one system, renewals in another and procurement in another. Moreover, the channel is very much focused on transactional business.

But what if you had end-to-end estate management, with intelligent data mining and a single view of your and your customers' estates, across contracts, renewals and the installed base?

When transactional data is brought together with historical trends – new sales with renewals, sales-out data with vendor cross-sell and up-sell rules – new insights and opportunities can appear by connecting information from across the supply chain.

This means, I think, making use of configuration management databases and IT asset management (ITAM) tools and processes.

Estate management differs from pure ITAM because it involves all the stakeholders in the channel – reseller, vendor, distributor and ultimately the end customer.

Some key players are already doing this. So if you don't, they may eat from your table. Also, your data is a differentiator in itself, offering more value to customers, and it can also help you move away from a commodity play.

Channel partners could also team up to share data and intelligence, entering new markets. Market conditions overall continue to be tough and being able to identify new opportunities from data you already have is surely of value.

Simon Ellis is EMEA director and business unit head of estate management solutions at Avnet