July 2010 Archives

It might have taken seven months but there has been an openness during the McAfee distribution review that has been refreshing.

In several briefings the UK and Ireland channel director Jill Henry talked about the aims of the review and then explained why it was taking the time it did.

These days a vendor cannot simply put out a call for tender for a contract and expect the world to stay still while that process goes through the necessary stages. There is consolidation, which can take the field of bidders down, in this case from nine to seven, and there are the global aims of a distribution head to take into consideration.

With most security vendors looking to maximize value from resellers and to get them to sell across a wide portfolio it is not a surprise that the same criteria has now been applied to distribution.

In a conversation with Henry she said that the vendor wanted to get more out of distribution and understood that it had a value to add that was part of its ambitions to grow market share. Plenty of other vendor's have similar ambitions and it's good to hear distribution being talked of as more than just a logistics and credit engine.

So at the end of the process the number of distributors have dropped from four to three and the review can be put to one side and normal business can resume. But for other vendors thinking of doing the same there are some real lessons to be learnt here not just about taking the time to get it right but how talking about it while the process is on-going can be useful.

Last night my mother in law went missing. She is 71, suffers from memory problems and had gone to visit family in Exeter, a long way away from her home in North London.

A coach delay and the driver's decision to miss a stop triggered a six hour absence that involved several police forces and put the family through an evening of torment.

In that situation what you want to do more than anything is feel that you are doing something. The urge to jump into a car and drive to Exeter and go around looking for her is a difficult one to resist because it meets the overpowering need to be active.

But when that isn't practical there turned out to be another answer and one that might just surprise those people that believe social networking is a pointless vanity exercise.

After being given the green light by the police I called for help in the search for my mother-in-law on Twitter.

I watched as my call for help in locating her went ever wider and it wasn't long before someone contacted me prepared to go to the coach station and look for her. That was the very thing I wanted to do myself but in the absence of getting there a Twitter contact was going to go and do it for me.

Just put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Here is someone busy minding their own business who sees the call for help and responds. She puts to one side her plans for the evening and goes to the coach station, alerts security there and then goes on a hunt round the pedestrianised shopping area to see if there are any signs of my aged relative there.

I didn't offer a reward, it was a simple call for help and it was answered. The support and the goodwill, with people offering ideas and assistance, was staggering. It even surprised the police when I mentioned it to them when they came to get further details of my missing mother-in-law.

In the end she was found and the saga had a happy ending but of course there are going to be plenty of lessons that this experience has taught her family.

But there is another lesson here about the power of social networking. Twitter proved that it is a way to reach out to people who care, are prepared to give up their time and energy and it showed that when you need help there are new ways of getting support that deserve to be taken seriously.

Twitter might not have actually found her but it provided eyes that I couldn't have in the right places and it provided support in a time of trouble that you just wouldn't believe. Thank you to all those who tried to help.

So the Royal Family opens a Flickr account and as a result those who live and breathe the web start talking about it being a great sign and time to start talking again about building a digital Britain.

Forgive me for perhaps being a bit of a party pooper but it is hardly likely to be the Queen herself uploading pics of the Polo matches and grouse shoots. It will be some minion in the press office.

Of course that minion will be basking in the glow of the coverage that move will have gained and rightly so but let's not get carried away here.

What would be really great is if I could send a tweet or comment on a picture and have The Queen reply. Of course she won't because she doesn't have the time and she probably doesn't understand the first thing about it.

So is this a sign that the age of digital Britain is dawning? It helps but let's be honest it's not going to change things radically. 

In a conversation earlier this week with an industry source the conversation turned to using technology for call conferencing and the passion in the room went up a notch.

"Why aren't more resellers talking about video and audio conferencing? This is a technology that's time has come. Now is the time to be talking about it," he said with feeling.

Well if resellers take a look at recent research from Plantronics then the case for talking about conferencing calls is more relevant than ever.

Plantronics found that 84% of UK office workers quizzed revealed they are more reliant on conference calls than ever before but, and here's the reseller opportunity, 85% did not have supporting technology to help carry those calls out.

Paul Clark, general manager at Plantronics, said that calls had to be useful and engaging but technology also played a crucial role.

"A staggering number of people are wasting their time, and that of others, by holding ineffective calls. As well as providing the correct supporting technology, businesses should try to teach staff the fundamental rules of conference calls to get the most out of what can be a cost effective and productive way to do business," he said.

So if you are looking for a topical sales pitch, want to sound authorative with some research at ytour finger tips then you could do a lot worse than talk conferencing.

There is an expression 'if you build it they will come' but what happens when they don't? This is a question that is asked with more and more regularity as channel players look to launch new initiatives and engage with social media platforms worried that having spent some time and effort doing so the pay back will not be immediate or good enough to convince those that signed off the investment it was worth making.

If the problem is bad now then it will only get worse in the future as we all become bombarded by more sites and places to find information.

The conclusions that I can draw based on the experience of this blog is that it is all well and good bashing out and sharing some thoughts but what you really need to do is tell people about it.

The same is true for any channel activities. Blowing the trumpet is going to be an essential part of grabbing attention. Even if you think that everyone is blowing theirs and making a lot of noise you still have to do it. Fail to do any promotion and you will end up wondering why no one came.

With Gartner spending most of the last few weeks coming up with sets of rights for those selling IT maintenance and users' cloud rights it seemed like a good idea to set out the things resellers should be able to expect from customers.

Sadly most of the time the dealer is the whipping boy used to provide miracles at the cheapest price and liable to take the flak if anything goes wrong.

But wouldn't it be great if there were rights that resellers could expect and even demand from customers? Here are my six but please feel free to suggest your own. Who knows we might be able to devise a code of conduct.

What resellers have the right to expect from customers:

• The right to be dealt with sensibly
• The right to be understood by people with some technical knowledge
• The right to have the value of services understood
• The right to have a customer that can look beyond just price
• The right to deal with a customer that understands the value of accreditations
• The right to tell the customer they can't do everything for less

When you hear things about Symantec reducing its threshold on its SME specialisation from $100,000 to just $10,000 it makes you wonder why you bother having a threshold at all.

Clearly the bar was set too high but if it is too low then it makes it almost a formality that the threshold will be reached and that might hit the perceived value of the scheme.

Resellers will welcome the reduction in the demands from the vendor but you could imagine after that initial good feeling has worn off things will move to a situation where SME business becomes normal business and the need for a specialism is reduced if not removed all together.

We will wait and see what happens in the long-term but at least for now this is good news for the channel.

The idea of getting everyone of working age online is an admirable one and perhaps also a concept that has been talked about before?

I pose that question only because it feels as if the move to get more people online has been going almost as long as the internet with tools deployed in the past such as the Home Computing Initiative and the whole drive of e-government for the last few years has been designed to encourage more digital participation.

So it is perhaps with that track record in mind that you end up giving the Networked Nation manifesto from Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox a slightly more lukewarm welcome than perhaps she might have expected.

In this cash-strapped age the expectation is on government and charities to help reach out to the 10m people in this country who have never used the internet and to help get them involved in a wonderful digital world.

That will not be as easy as it sounds because these millions of people have been cut off from the web for reasons that include poverty and presumably interest and overcoming both will be a challenge.

Still it's good to hear the government making some positive sounds about getting people connected. After all technology has largely been absent from the political agenda since the Cam/Clegg love-in started.

When someone of the stature of Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft, stands up and dedicates his keynote speech at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) to the subject of the cloud you know this is a technology that he and his company believes has arrived.

Now Microsoft will point out that Ballmer has been talking about the cloud for four years and stepped up the rhetotic in the last 18 months so this isn't something new but you can detect that the message has shifted up a gear.

After all you don't chuck the phrase "an inflextion point in the industry" without thinking about it first and many beyond the Microsoft world will be looking into what Ballmer had to say.

For those beyond the Microsoft channel the message seems pretty clear. When a vendor of that size decides that the time is right for a technology it has the ability to shape and form opinions across a very wide user base. The ripples from the noises being made at WPC will ripple across the market and should benefit all resellers trying to pitch a hosted service.

Microsoft will not own the cloud, it faces some tough competition from the likes of Google in that race, but it can have a real impact on the debate and that process has certianly started.

One of the findings of an extensive SAP survey into the way CIOs are using software was the number of users that are already viewing the iPad as a business tool.

SAP found that 7% of mobile workers are using it even though it has only been on the market for three months.

I haven't had the chance to play with an iPad yet but based on my experiences with the iPhone it is a good piece of tech but not one necessarily designed for heavy use in a business environment. Happy to be corrected on that of course but too many fingers and thumbs for me to make it something to use all day.

We will have to see how far the iPad can go because potentially the tablet sector is one that is opening up and if the likes of SAP are taking it seriously then perhaps more of us should do so as well.

In the spirit of transparency and openness that Nick Clegg keeps going on about let me start by stating that I'm no fan of the education secretary Michael Gove. Tempted to go further and reveal I can't stand the man but for the sake of balance let's keep that bit to one side.

Where there is a problem with Gove is in the way that with just a few weeks in government when the moment comes for him to step forward and make a major political announcement he fluffs it. The plan was to stand up and talk tough about deficits, quality and value and then shelf the Building Schools for the Future scheme.

That scheme not only gave schools the chance to get new buildings but it also improved the technology that pupils could get access to. You don't have to be a politician to be aware that making sure the next generation is armed with the latest knowledge of technology makes a great deal of sense from a future competitiveness point of view. Obviously the scheme benefited not just schools but builders and IT firms that could offer their products and services under a BSF tender process.

But most of that is now going to be history and getting back to the plan all Gove had to do following his announcement of cuts and reviews to BSF was issue a list of those schools impacted. Unfortunately that he could not do.

The embarrassing result is that he not only finds himself apologizing but some of those contractors that thought they had kept some BSF business only to find it gone might now turn to legal means to get some compensation.

But what worries me more is not just the cock-ups but the way these cuts are being delivered. BSF might on the face of it be education spending and therefore public sector money but it was the private sector that delivered the IT and the private sector that built the new schools. They have both been hit and could well end up losing jobs as a result.

Bear in mind that the BSF announcement comes just a few weeks after the government announced the closure of BECTA, which advised schools on what technology to buy, and you start to see my concerns, which are that cuts might be easy to make on paper but who is clearing up the mess afterwards.

Are you going to end up in a non Becta and BSF future with schools popping into PC World to get their kit? The lack of thought about what comes next is alarming and the way BSF has been handled provides no crumbs of comfort that the government knows what it is doing.

As the latest text came through from one supplier offering unlimited broadband at home my eyes were caught by a blog post from the founder of Thinkbroadband.com who was discussing the same subject.

Sebastien Lahtinen is talking about a subject that is increasingly becoming a hot potato with the Advertising Standards Authority currently holding a review to try and weed out those unlimited offers that actually contain limits in the small print.

Those like Lahtinen who are opting for honesty argue that unlimited broadband is a phrase that is increasingly becoming redundant as we all have to face up to the reality that the web is creaking under the weight of the current usage.

If you think that the current level of applications and videos is making life difficult, and the cloud is growing as route of providing another way of connecting, things are only just starting to get problematic for those selling broadband.

I'm not legal expert but I suspect that the ASA will come out and say that those stating an offer is unlimited when in actual fact it is capped at a gigabyte or two will be told they cannot do that anymore.

Welcome to the new world where if you miss Eastenders on tv then you can watch it on iPlayer but you may well end up paying for it. That will change the consumer world and on the business front the channel might well spend the next year or so helping users understand the limits and helping them control costs. That infrastructure consultancy business could well be the silver lining.

These days it's possible to sponsor a fair bit if you are an inventive company and so it was perhaps no surprise that a javelin thrower set for the Olympics would be a target for a distributor.

You can imagine now the potential for "hitting the target" and "Moving beyond the competition" marketing phrases in the run-up to London 2012 as ComputerLinks looks to get the most out of its support for British number one javelin thrower Goldie Sayers.

But there is another connection here with Sayers sharing her birth town with ComputerLinks making Newmarket famous for more than just horse racing.

You might be wondering what a distributor can give a javelin thrower to help in their training but the Lenovo laptop that was handed over by David Caughtry, director of core technology at ComputerLinks, who hopes that Sayers will be able to use the web to share her experiences on social media.

"Blogging is a great way for me to keep in touch with my family, friends and supporters, especially when I'm training or competing overseas. With ComputerLinks' support, I can now update my blog quickly and easily -wherever I am in the world. It's great to know there are people back home supporting you - even when you are thousands of miles away," Sayers said.

We look forward to reading her progress and the inevitable "hitting the target" campaign from ComputerLinks.

The current mantra in the software industry around the mid-market is putting increasing pressure on those channel players that are being directed towards that slice of the customer base by vendors.

As the enterprise market slows down, or is increasingly sold to via direct vendor sales teams, the mid-market along with the SME space have emerged as key battlegrounds in the hunt for profitable business.

The pressure to get more out of the mid-market has increased even more in the last couple of months with the government reducing public sector budgets forcing even more reliance onto the mid market.

But the prospect of an already crowded market becoming stretched to breaking point is worrying some of those resellers hoping to get more mid-market revenue.

"The growth is not going to come from anywhere else but if I was an IT director of one of the 3,000 odd organisations [identified as mid-market targets] then they are going to be swamped and they may stop answering the phones," said one reseller.

But with public sector being reduced and the mid-market one of the few areas that is seen to be spending then the competition is likely to be greater in that space.

In the good old days there used to be a seasonality to the channel that meant that any week now things would start to grind down for the summer.

It was never as extreme as the summer breaks the French enjoy but it was there nonetheless and it impacted the timing of product launches and events in the industry. It also of course dictated which was the weakest quarter in the year.

But in a conversation with a reseller contact the other day the question of a return to seasonality was met with a negative response. Things are moving in an unpredictable way month to month.

The consensus seems to be that the first quarter was very good, a real return to form after a tough 2009. But then it dipped with a poor April before bouncing back with for some a record breaking May. June didn't seem to be looking too bad as we moved into July.

Perhaps seasonality will never return and that might not be such a bad thing if July and August deliver better results but it's not a great thought that the final quarter of the year might not produce the high volumes of sales we have all come to know and expect.

There have been some people in the channel with the desire to get a flat and predictable monthly performance as an alternative to seasonal peaks and troughs. But we don't seem to be anywhere near that situation either.

The real victims of the monthly up and down sales figures are those in the financial departments responsible for planning and keeping an eye on the numbers. Their models and charts have been struggling to have a relevance for quite a while now.

What it means is that as we enter what would have been a slow period there is every chance that it will not dip as much as some people expect. Most of us would love a decent summer financially but think of those in finance who not only used the seasonal models to predict revenue but also used them to know when to go on holiday.

It was with not a great deal of surprise but a sense of dismay that the news of the axing of Business Links floated across the desk.

This network of support centres not only helped establish businesses by advising on grants and how to handle the red tape but it also aimed to provide advice for entrepreneurs who were looking to become the next Bill Gates.

A lot of things are being shut down at the moment as the coalition government looks to cut left, right and centre but you do have to wonder about the wisdom of some of the cuts. On paper yes it looks like its easy money being clawed back but the long term ramifications of the measures are yet to be seen.

In reports the government minister responsible for shutting down the regional business links said that they spent too much time sign posting and not enough time advising.

Real people in real buildings are to be replaced by an online platform that will provide all the information the entrepreneurs of the future need.