New solution turns the NZ channel on its head

The cloud era has brought wide and sweeping changes across New Zealand. It's not just IT departments that have transformed, but also the roles of resellers and distributors.

It's clear that in this new cloud IT world, services are key to the future for resellers – but creating and delivering new services is a great challenge. Fortunately, Dicker Data has devised a solution to this problem.

Dicker Data marketing manager, Annan Song says the traditional engagement model has been turned on its head, as they are now on-boarding niche services products offered by their resellers, which makes them the vendors and Dicker Data their sales engine.

Dicker Data's approach of taking the best of their resellers' services and making them available to all their customers – just like any other product – has enabled resellers to add value to their customers and secure immediate revenue and profit without the cost, pain and delay of developing a new in-house service.

"We realised our customers might be concerned about introducing a competitor to their end clients, so we needed to select providers who could manage any perceived conflict," Song says.

Song uses Kinetics as an example, as they easily ticked this box having delivered their Coaching Service through other IT companies in the past without any competitive conflict.

Kinetics managing director, Andrew Hunt says they spent years building their Computer Coaching service (which is primarily focused around Microsoft's productivity suite) into what it is today.

"Adding new services is hard and takes time," Hunt says. "So it made perfect sense that other IT providers wanted to leverage our capability and avoid the cost and delay of creating their own".

LANtech sales and marketing director, Rex Bullard affirms this whole idea was new territory for them, but Dicker Data's recommendation of Kinetics made them comfortable about engaging with them. He is now excited at the potential for this to add revenue while increasing the value they provide to their customers.

"Kinetics lays out a really clear process with clear demarcation of responsibilities," Bullard says. "Any reseller thinking about growing revenue should be doing more of this. You can have more arrows in your quiver without needing to build in house capability.

Song says the introduction of cloud-based software has completely changed the field, with research and development and its implementation around the new features and performance enhancements deployed in real time.

"Software version upgrades that were needed every 3-4 years (under perpetual licencing) are rapidly disappearing or have disappeared," Song says. "To keep employees up to date and in order to leverage the latest improvements to increase your business productivity, software learning should no longer be considered as a one-off requirement.

It's certainly an ever-changing business environment, but it's good to see that Dicker Data is evolving and transforming to keep ahead of the pulse.