Authoritative analysis of Europe’s ICT channels
ISVs look for clearer role in technology channels
Why are gold and other ISV competency levels not recognised by customers?
By John Garratt
In our issue at the end of February, we ran a story (below) on how a distributor supplied a customer directly because no local reseller had the skills. As well as some readers standing on principle, and saying that the risk to its reputation was too great, we’ve had some pragmatists, trying to look at it from the customer’s point of view. So we brought together some of the viewpoints, and got more comment from the original decision- makers. There were plenty of off-the-record comments from other parts of the channel, indicating that this is a more common practice than some might think.......
ISVs are unclear as to the relationship with vendors and other channel players. Attempts to get them to cross-sell each others applications seem not to work. Red Hat Exchange (RHX), a marketplace for selling applications launched two years ago is no more. And Novell’s similar Market Start programme has gone dark. Werner Knoblich, EMEA General Manager told
IT Europa: “Red Hat itself still engages with ISVs, but it does not act as a forum.” He points to the annual partner meeting as the place where ISVs can meet each other, “in a much less formal” arrangement. The problem seems also to be a lack of
perceived market support and business leads. Dr. Constantine Goulimis, Director of ISV Greycon, which has just been awarded Gold ISV status
line by over 20%. “This means we have had a stronger growth period last 12 month than the time before. And budgets have been cut back so we are expecting a greater growth in the com- ing year than before, says“ David Galton-Fenzi (picture, next page), Group Sales and Marketing Manager at Zycko. He says that the disruptive technologies like
Z
ycko must be doing something right. It has just finished its financial year, having grown revenues and bottom
world-wide nature, is measured in the hundreds not the thousands and our systems have an entry price of around €50k. Our customers are at least 5x and as much as 5,000x bigger than we are (financially).” “We are already very international, so we don’t
use Microsoft’s connections for this. And Gold competency level is not very important for them [the customers]. In these situations Gold ISV status does not bring huge benefits to us. Ideally Microsoft would co-sponsor some case studies or similar, but the stuff that we do is not
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14-15 Warm welcome for distributor in the Nordics
Ingram Micro: market “glimmers”
INGRAM Micro closed the 2009 year with glimmers of a strong market, “a far cry from how we started the year,” says CEO Greg Spierkel. In the fourth quarter it returned to year-
over-year revenue growth for the first time in six quarters despite one less sales week in the prior year period. Sequential revenue growth of 19% exceeded seasonal norms, building on the healthy 12% sequential growth delivered in the third quarter.
During last year’s downturn, the priority was
those from Force10 Networks (the supplier at the heart of this story) are starting to make a lot of sense. Mike Augustine, Force10 Networks’ country manager for the UK points to the changes in the market: “We have found that in the high performance com-
to focus more on margin protection than revenue growth, while more recently it strategically leveraged gross margins to drive sales.
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puting areas there are a large number of these gaming sites.” High performance is key and he suggests people would be surprised at
the number of gaming sites, - particularly in the central and eastern European sites. “We’ve [growth in] seen Russia, Poland and the east. There is a significant growth in that type of facility. One customer in Russia now has 20 million
Distie goes direct - “no reseller in area”
DISTRIBUTOR Zycko sold direct to a major end-user in Hungary because no suitable partner was available to do the deal. As a key Internet Exchange in Central and Eastern Europe, interconnecting approximately 50 ISPs and 60% of internal Hungarian Internet traffic, BIX is a big Hungarian customer. Zycko, the UK based distributor, supplied it with a Force10 solution, finding that it was “simple for the BIX engineers” to install into a new cage and start moving their customers over to the TeraScale system. David Galton-Fenzi, Group Sales Director at
Zycko, says: “In this case there wasn’t a qualified reseller in the area who understood the Force10
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CONTEXT 13
Snapshot of the leading European channels
INTERVIEW 17
What does the rising government IT spend mean for Europe’s IT channels?
NATIONAL SURVEY 18-25 Spain
Spain: an economy flattened, but there are some surprising signs of upturn and growth
Stop press
Russian ministry drops own Linux plan
It has been confirmed that the Russian
education ministry which has been working on its own Linux distro for the last two years has been told to drop it. The ide had been for all universities and schools to adopt one standard operating system. But people at the top appear to have recognised that the development work required to keep it up to date would be too demanding, and that it would be better to adopt one of the more generally available Linux distros. Red Hat’s EMEA boss Werner Knoblich confirms that after three meetings in the last year with the
aims to meet the need.
Minister, the home-grown idea is dead.
“The gaming sites are exceptionally strong and
have really taken over from the web 2.0 business areas. Google and Yahoo gave us considerable growth, but it is the gaming sites – a new industry that has emerged, and is quite cash-rich.” Expect to see more in western Europe as well. Mike Augustine: “This is the
23/02/2010 10:20
pattern. We are growing our sales team and we are looking at the UK gaming industry and we have people who know that market. For me the interesting dynamic is that they (the clients) don’t necessarily buy on brand; they are
users - paying 6$ a month.” In Russia and central Europe, this is still a small part of the population, but they have a lot of spending power. Gambling and other sorts of site are all increasing this sort of demand. And Force 10
by Microsoft says that while it gets to use its tools internally for development at no or discounted cost, and the Microsoft partnership brings in a level of credibility to customers, “our customers find us on their own (without Microsoft).” Greycon is a very specialist software
By John Garratt
john.garratt@
iteuropa.com
company, selling mathematical-optimisation- based solutions primarily to the paper and (plastic) film industries worldwide, he explains. “So our customer base, despite its
Newsletter Issue 04
February 26th 2010
INSIDE THIS ISSUE...
So what would you do?
CA study of channel optimism shows some wide variations
32
NEWS 4-11
Cisco-Tandberg path emerges; APX manages NEC partners; Talend channel plans; channel job forecasts; where Dell is seeing better sales; Tech Data Azlan acquisition.....
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30 APR 2010
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