"What solution providers now say is...let me partner with other VARs for the solutions my customers are asking for but that I don't want to spend money to adopt ," says Bob Stegner, vice president of U.S. marketing at Ingram Micro.
Enterprise Technology Group's Palmer says he engages, on average, with Ingram's VTN program three times a month. Through that system, he is able to be a one-stop shop for one client that has 65 satellite offices nationwide. This client calls for everything from break-fix repairs on printers to helping install connectivity for remote salespeople. He has some simple advice to those resellers that are still stubbornly holding onto the old mentality:
"If they are that concerned with engaging a partner, then they don't have a good enough relationship with their clients," he says. "I told one guy at the VTN event, 'You should go figure out how to have a better relationship with your clients.' I just see that as fundamental."
Sometimes the choice between engaging a partner and not engaging a partner is losing a customer. "Let's say a customer says, 'I need a VoIP assessment.' What do I say? 'No?' Then the customer will go to someone else. Now I have a real competitive situation," Palmer says.
Scott Goemmel, director of Detroit-based M/C Service Solutions, a division of O/E Systems, also based in Detroit, says the company generates approximately 85 percent of its revenue by providing hardware support--generally long-term maintenance, including areas such as PCs, printers, servers and networking infrastructure. Without a doubt, this has become more of a commodity skill set, giving the customers more leverage in pricing. So a dispatching system like IMSN becomes a cost-effective way for the service provider to deliver hardware maintenance support.
So, do resellers believe that partnering and subcontracting is a permanent trend? Some say it's tied to a down economy because, particularly for vendors, commodity sales have slowed and alternate ways of generating business needed to be discovered, says Ray Morton, director of technical services at Daly Computers, based in Clarksburg, Md. When the economy picks up, Morton expects commodity sales to increase so the percentage of overall sales through partnerships will be lower. But, he says, it will continue to be a viable part of the IT business.
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