SECTOR REVIEW arkets for new technology
channel,” said Phil Adams, Head of Communication. “We are experiencing month-on-month growth of trading accounts as we ease their entry into telecommunications and UC solutions. We anticipate significant growth in these sectors in the coming 12 months as we continue to develop our portfolio.”
The ongoing development of new and converging IP technologies requires a different approach to the market and a different distributor to service the needs of both the traditional PBX reseller and data VAR, believes Adams. “As we move forward, education, training and services will be the key to success,” he said. “Our focus will be on delivering educational seminars and improving our service offering for both voice and data channels, re-aligning our business to offer a single point of contact for all UC and converged technology requirements while offering a high level of pre-sales support for unified comms and networking topology.”
Strategic focus Micro-P’s strategy will be focused around hosting, converged technologies, unified communications and services. “We will be encouraging resellers to leverage their existing relationships and reach into new markets with new products and technologies, increasing wallet share and improving margins,” added Adams. “In parallel we will be providing a range of value added services to ease the sales process, deploy the relevant systems and service of the solution.”
In general, notes Adams, all voice, data and AV channels operate as silos but the technologies are merging. “We are starting to see significant growth of voice communications in the data VAR sector, but neither the voice or AV sectors have responded,” he observed. “Our challenge is to remove the fear factor of entering the realm of new technologies for traditional channels and present them with the opportunity to leverage their relationships with existing customers and maximise sales opportunities. Education, ease of access to a high level of pre and post-sales technical support, together with a range of professional value added engineering services would remove the fear factor and pain of entry into new markets and technologies.”
VAD Wick Hill is ‘extremely bullish’ about the market opportunities across its whole convergence portfolio, states Ian Kilpatrick, Chairman. “For the coming year, our budget planning and sales expectations are for major growth in convergence and mobility security,” he said. “User awareness is growing strongly around the security risks associated with smartphones, while the increased implementation of IP connectivity will drive gateway security sales. We are also predicting major growth in SIP trunking and low cost SBCs. We will be working hard at introducing new areas to our new partners, training them and supporting them in the sales process. This will be alongside our continued activity with our key vendors.”
Wick Hill will be working closely with the channel to
deliver these new services and security solutions to existing partners. Kilptrick added: “In convergence, one of the biggest challenges is that security is at the point where IT data security was 15 years ago. The challenge is to raise awareness of the threats. The opportunity is in the huge growth potential that is there. Similarly, as end users begin to decide that bandwidth isn’t such a low cost, unlimited resource that it was once perceived to be, our sales growth on QOS and application acceleration solutions will further increase.”
There was a time when traditional telecoms solutions were not compatible with the data reseller channel, but with the UC solution Wave and the move by Polycom to build more software-based apps into its solutions, data resellers are becoming the channel of choice for these products, according to Mark Shane, Sales Director, ICON. “Microsoft’s commitment to telecoms and its strategic partnership with Polycom has to be one of the most influential trends in the market at the moment,”
he said. “Microsoft’s participation is likely to cause a paradigm shift in licencing and pricing, and the data reseller business model will become more influential in the channel.”
Determining factors Another key determining factor shaping the market will be the shift to hosted or cloud-based solutions. Figures suggest that the hosted solutions market will grow in double figures out to 2015. “This will not necessarily be a threat to CPE solutions but it will mean the channel will need to learn to sell against cloud- based solutions, especially those channel partners whose business focuses on the SMB market,” added Shane. “The moves of the big influencers such as Polycom and Microsoft will have a major effect on the structure of the market and the shares of established players,” he predicts. “The planned move by Polycom to expand its handset portfolio into the high volume carpeted office environment with the introduction of new handsets will seriously disrupt market shares in this segment.”
COMPANY SNAPSHOT – ARROW ECS
IN TERMS of convergence business Arrow ECS’ big focus during the past year has been on mid-large enterprises with virtualised voice and UC solutions attracting significant interest. “We have bullish growth plans around this based on Siemens Enterprise Communications’ solutions,” said Annette Reynolds, Senior Business Development Manager. The three main market trends and emerging markets that are influencing Arrow’s strategy this year are UC, virtualisation and data centres. “We have resellers already focused on these sectors who are looking to add UC and voice to their offers,” commented Reynolds. “We are expanding our offering in the virtualised space by working with VMWare and Citrix partners, where bundled offers and pre-built solutions are a strong element of this proposition.”
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Tim Brooks, Managing Director of Westcon Convergence UK, has reaffirmed the distributor’s commitment to the SME channel where he is seeing great success. One key growth area, says Brooks, is videoconferencing. “We have seen consistent growth in videoconferencing sales with more UC resellers now selling video as part of an overall solution,” commented Brooks. “This is certain to continue for the next 12 months driven in part by vendors such as Avaya fully integrating video solutions into their portfolio. We also saw greater investment in data infrastructure and believe this trend will continue.”
Brooks is also optimistic for a resurgence in the UC market. “Our SME business is growing and we are gaining market share,” he said. “There is greater uptake of UC apps among SME customers who have cost savings, productivity and collaboration high on their agenda. Wireless LAN is another area to watch. We expect this to become more ubiquitous as a greater number of data partners adopt wireless LAN.”
Westcon Convergence has also been developing a proposition around Microsoft Lync and is gearing up for its launch. “We see opportunities for both UK MS accredited resellers and existing UC resellers,” added Brooks. “Many of our peripheral and complementary vendors such as Plantronics, Jabra, Polycom, and SBC vendors like Acme Packet and Sipera enhance this offering as part of a complete solution.” n
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