By Mark Davison at Discover 2013, Barcelona – Resellers who resist change and refuse to adopt new business models to address the evolving IT sector are doomed at best to stagnation and, at worst, to extinction.
This is the pragmatic view of Jos Brenkel, senior vice-president PPS channel sales EMEA, who says that in today’s industry there are two types of resellers.
“There are those resellers moving towards a service-based model, embracing it, and growing at between 15% and 20%; and there are those ignoring services, trying to maintain the traditional hardware model, and who are not growing.”
Brenkel says that new business models in the channel are being driven ultimately by customers.
“It all starts with the end user,” he says. “They are moving towards cloud-based solutions and there is more requirement from them for ‘as a service’ offerings. They are moving in the direction of how to improve their processes, change their old IT infrastructures to new ones and, ultimately, moving to applications-based models as opposed to centralised data centre models.
“Resellers have to be aware of these changing models and have to adapt new models of their own if they want to survive and prosper,” he says.
Brenkel says that resellers should not feel isolated and that collaboration with other resellers to provide services is an avenue being exploited in many territories around the world.
“In India, for example, there is a group of 15 resellers who have collaborated together in order to provide various services to their various customers,” he explains. “It has proved highly successful for them and is an example of collaboration that could be replicated in other markets, particularly emerging markets.
“There is good revenue in services – and the sooner resellers realise this, the better,” he adds.