By Simon Quicke
26 June 2008
Resellers need to concentrate on selling solutions that deliver a return on investment, save costs and help further customer infrastructure consolidation.
Vendors from across the industry have produced that advice based on the experience of the first six months of 2008.
“Although the economic climate doesn't appear to have had an effect so far on IT spending, with costs for commodities such as energy ever increasing, it's clear that businesses will have to adapt quickly to mounting economic pressures in order to maintain growth and profitability through the remainder of the year,” said Phil McLean, ISS Business Development Manager Hewlett-Packard UK & Ireland.
“We encourage all of our customers to think in terms of the total cost of ownership of both their existing infrastructure and future investments,” he added.
The same pressure on pricing was seen elsewhere in the hardware market.
”With the onset of the credit crunch, consumers and businesses across all sectors are purchasing more cautiously. This has resulted in vendors bringing down prices to ensure sales remain stable or developing new products aimed at adding more value for long term gains,” said Marcus Harvey, UK channel sales director at Lexmark.
“The key challenge over the next six months will be finding a happy medium between pricing and solutions which fit a customer’s needs,” he added.
In the storage market there were also vendors calling on resellers to focus on those technologies that appealed in the current economic climate.
“Throughout the food chain of the IT industry the need to curtail costs and maintain, or even increase, performance with existing technologies like server virtualisation, thin provisioning and data deduplication have all had the upper hand on competitors trying to shift traditional solutions,” said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at 3PAR.
