North/South divide widens
By Alex Scroxton
11 July 2008
Despite the increasing mobility of the UK’s workforce, there is a view gaining ground that the gap in both IT skills and distributor coverage between the North and the South is widening.
The number of larger companies that have their headquarters in the North can be counted on one hand, with Tyneside-based accountancy software kingpin Sage among the few well known examples. Most vendors are confined to the M4 corridor, the area stretching from Brentford in London through Heathrow, Reading and Swindon.
Darren Stringer, managing director at Huddersfield-based Brighter Connections, noted the two biggest distributors in the UK – Ingram Micro and Computer 2000 – were based in Milton Keynes and Basingstoke respectively, and with the addition of Gloucestershire-based Comstor, highlighted a particular issue in the Cisco channel.
But a quick scan of the other major distribution players in the UK revealed a similar southern bias, with clusters around Berkshire (Avnet, Westcon and Horizon) and Birmingham (SCC and Interface), and a few wild cards, such as East Anglia-based Computerlinks and Midwich. Some of these firms, notably Horizon and SCC, have northern branch offices.
This geographic bias, and a “de-skilling” of distribution staff over the past 10 years, meant that distributors were unable to offer comprehensive northern coverage, said Stringer, and this had a knock-on effect in terms of how vendors dealt with the problem.
“I have had vendors contacting me directly because they are concerned that their distributors are not doing a very good job as regards business development with SME resellers,” he said.
“There are vendors complaining that they do 70% of their business in London and the South East.”
David Ellis, director of e-security and training at Computerlinks, said his firm did not see the North/South divide as a problem, but he could understand why some other distributors were being criticised, putting it down to staff attrition.
“Our location in Newmarket means our staff turnover is very low. If we were in the M4 Corridor, people would move around,” he said.
“Everyone else is poaching each other’s staff all the time, and because of that they never get a strong understanding of the technology, or the time to build their reseller contacts.”
Comstor’s recently appointed marketing director, Warwick Taylor, told MicroScope that the distributor was awake to such concerns among its nationally-spread reseller base. He said the distributor was taking steps to reintroduce northern roadshows and sales training days.
Peter Titmus, managing director at network services provider Networks First, which is based in the West Midlands, believed the problem was also an issue for smaller manufacturers, which often found themselves unable to invest in the North.
“For the big vendors it is less of a problem,” he said. “Cisco has a good Manchester operation, for example, but we have noticed that some smaller vendors do not have as much sales support available in the North.”
Titmus added that some vendors who had run product roadshows in the North had been disappointed with the attendance rates, pointing out that, compared with the M4 corridor, things were more spread out.
“It is not like along the M4, where you can start the day with a meeting in Swindon and pop down the motorway to London in the afternoon,” he said.
Peter Macdonald, technology director at Croft Technology, which is based in Newcastle, said it was possible to support a national services operation from anywhere in the UK without too much difficulty but there were other impacts of the North/South divide.
“The reason it bugs us is that the intellect is drained from the North. The young people work for a couple of years in a local company and then head down South to earn more money,” he said.
