Interesting story from The Register that Microsoft was considering ditching one of it’s three broadline general disties, Bell Micro, Ingram and C2K.
… and we know that Microsoft have brought on Westcoast as a new distributor and we know a certain lady who is very close to our hearts who has joined them to lead the charge!
So, there is some interesting stuff going on and it seems Microsoft has been trying to give a bit of a kick up the arse to its disties. We’ve all had our “interesting” experiences with distributors and we all know that if you’re a small business then you get a pretty raw deal by many! Having said that, I work with an amazing IBM distributor called Avnet who have amazing people. Incredible how they’ve supported iQubed.
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June 28th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
We heard about it during a visit from out account manager with Ideal (now just Bell Micro). I was keeping an eye out to see who got booted as we have accounts with all three (and Westcoast!)
It certainly gave Bell a kick as they had a massive Microsoft push which involved new “micro-sites” and lots of promotional material. It’ll be interesting to see if they keep it up now they are “safe”
June 29th, 2007 at 12:03 am
The impression I got at the recent Channel Summit was that Microsoft wants the distributors to raise their game. There are a whole range of new products and technologies from Microsoft which are ever more complex and sophisticated. So, the disties can’t just treat it as commodity buying/selling. I think they can become quite comfortable in their positions and whether Microsoft was actually ever going to drop one, I’m not sure. Maybe a game of brinkmanship? First one that blinks loses!
June 29th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I can understand Microsoft’s viewpoint
One thing that is very frustrating when dealing with disties (for us anyway) is that they don’t quite have the knowledge to appreciate what the solutions do at a lower level
If we have a query about something (simple example, a query over which SKU we should be ordering) we normally ask the question, the question gets misunderstood, then we get lots of unhelpful answers where we then end up finding out ourselves.
We do get this when buying software from other vendors (and also hardware!) but it’s good that Microsoft are pushing from the top
If we keep pushing from the bottom maybe one day it’ll all be much simpler