Strategic Alliance Magazine Q4 2017 - 31

BIG CHANNEL BETS

selling "stuff " and more about insight into the customer
business, solving customer problems, providing specialized skills, and enabling right business outcomes. This
is a new muscle for many channel partners who have
typically been selling to the IT function, or in some
cases, have positioned themselves as virtual chief information officers.
Distributors often are commissioned to deliver sales
and sales-enablement to channel partners. Some have
specifically shifted the sales content to equipping channel partners to sell business outcomes to the line of
business (LOB) buyer, addressing the issues that keep
them up at night and offering well-integrated solutions
that can be provisioned from the cloud.
Some distributors have verticalized their sales and
partner support operations in order to be able to
support the need for industry expertise in creating a
trusted advisor relationship. Vertical expertise is critical to understanding business outcomes relevant to
the new LOB buyer and is a core competency as channel partners move to address opportunities in digital
transformation and IoT.

Building practices versus
technical enablement
Back to the point that cloud computing
is displacing a lot of traditional hardware/
software sales and services: Clearly the smart
money is in the cloud. A suite of opportunity exists for
channel partners embracing this business model as a
trusted advisor.
Channel partners have been surprisingly slow to develop the skills needed to thrive in the cloud. These will
become fundamental survival skills. While vendors
tend to focus on technical enablement that is specific to
their product set, as trusted advisors, channel partners
will need to address multi-vendor technical solutions
that solve business problems. Customers, after all, don't
buy a bag of parts.
Small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) are less invested in heavy data center operations, and moving to the
cloud relieves them of managing these operations. But
they still need help with understanding what operations
can move to the cloud and what is best kept on-prem,

For the most part
distributors, including
TechData, have not
been sitting around
like the proverbial
frog in the pot.
at least for now. They need an expert to help them plan
what the compute environment should look like for
them and to help implement and maintain it.
Cloud management services include assessments of
current system capabilities and requirements, implementation and provisioning of new cloud applications,
migration of on-prem assets to the cloud, hosting or
brokering cloud services, integration of cloud applications, and on-going support and maintenance of the
environment.
Here, again, is where distributors are seeking to add value. There is a shift in their technical enablement services
from vendor specific, which they still do, to also focusing
on broader sets of skills and training to help partners develop comprehensive cloud services practices.
Distributors are also investing in cloud marketplace
platforms that support partners in delivering cloud
solutions. These platforms enable partners to provision cloud services from multiple cloud providers,
i.e., Amazon, Google, Azure, and to provision other
cloud infrastructure services, such as cloud-managed
security. These platforms can facilitate integration of
multi-vendor solution stacks. They also provide billing
operations, which is a difficult logistical challenge for
most small partners when there are multiple application
services with multiple billing models, i.e., annual, quarterly, monthly, and by consumption. By managing the
back-end complexity, distributors create a valuable service for partners and customers alike that is not easily
displaced. It also enables partners to focus on sales and
technical services.
Q4 * 2017 | STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q4 2017