By Simon Quicke
26 June 2008
Among its other achievements in the last 14 months IronPort has managed to add a fair bit of fuel to the debate around the value of distribution.
When the email security specialist announced it was axing partners DNS and Sphinx last March, following an acquisition by Cisco, it seemed to be championing a single tier model.
But with the appointment of Comstor last week it has admitted it needed distribution to grow its SME business and added that it would be re-examining its channel with the possibility of increasing investment and support for partners (MicroScope 23 June).
“Resellers have been waiting for us to sign up with a distributor,” said James Lee, SMB and channel manager for Northern Europe at IronPort, who added that it made sense to do so with a Cisco channel partner that already had access to its parent’s products.
But it is not just resellers that have been waiting with distributors also keen to see if their ability to service the SME end of the market would get wider recognition.
When the great and the good met at the recent Global Technology Distribution Council (GDTC) investors day in London they were not only looking for financial backing but also stressing the benefits for vendors that chose to use a two-tier model.
Speaking at the event Dick Borsboom, EMEA president of Avnet Technology Solutions, said that the SME sector in particular was hard to reach and the knowledge about that market resided in distribution.
“The fastest growing sector of the market is also the hardest to reach,” he added “Distribution has an important role to play.”
Backing up that view was a panel including Bob Dutkowsky, CEO of Tech Data, who said that most vendors knowledge of the SME sector was poor: “They don’t know what it is or how to target it.”
“A dialogue with most senior executives at vendors turns rapidly into a conversation about SME penetration and most of them reward us for penetrating that market,” he added.
Klaus Hellmich, CEO of Actebis, said that the key role of distribution was around knowledge transfer and it was in the best position to devise programmes that would improve the reseller understanding and success at that end of the market.
“The SME market is very fragmented and has a lot of different needs,” he said.
With IronPort now returning to the two-tier fold the major exception to the broad trend is Dell, which aside from storage, continues to deal directly with resellers.
Alistair Edwards, senior analyst at Canalys, said that Dell was the exception and distribution was being embraced for more than just its SME market knowledge.
“There is an increased focus on distribution and it is key to getting a reach into the biggest growth oppoertunities, which include SME and emerging market,” he said.
“Even in the higher end products we are seeing a recognition that there is a role for distribution. The value added distributos are helping resellers get to grips with complex technology,” he added.
As well as providing contact with resellers serving customer segments targeted by the vendors there were other functions that a distributor could perform that added its value.
Joe Hemani, chairman of Westcoast, said that a lot of the functions of distribution appeared to be easy but were part of managing the supply chain.
“We provide reach and with that you can add all sorts of things like credit and management of the supply chain. Getting the product to the right place and customer are the things that are not easy, but they sound easy,” he said.
