The Sikh Geek

Following on from Mark’s post on this.

We, as in SBSC Partners do like to do the "mirror, mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all" and to have the vendors say that we are! But you know behind our backs they are busy dumping their hardware at quarter ends to retailers who will sell it cheaper than we can buy it from the original distributor and cursing us for the relative pittance we spend with them.

Obviously, we should only deal with an organisation that is 100% Channel focused (sarcasm intended)! But wait, what about Microsoft, your main Partner, that which you generate most of your revenue off either directly or by supporting their solutions is going Direct! Time to cancel that Partner agreement then! Yeah right, methinks not …

I know, we’ll go for a Channel friendly hardware vendor like HP because they don’t do direct do they? Ooops, what’s this, buying online from HP for Small & Medium Businesses! Okay, so at least they don’t do services, phew luckily it’s for Enterprise businesses and that’ll never come to SMB because your best mate Account Manager at HP says it won’t! Well, at least they only support Microsoft and wouldn’t want to push Linux - oh well, at least someone somewhere in the whole of HP has taken the SBS Exam (because that’s really hard!!).

Come on folks, we’ve got to learn to play the game and look for opportunities in these things because there are plenty of Partners/Customers buying Dell stuff!

It’s funny how coincidences happen as I was speaking to Dell’s UK Partner Director Andy Dow (formerly of Westcoast) and then I saw Susanne has joined Dell down under.

Dell’s UK Partner Programme can be found at http://www.dell.co.uk/partner and you can sign-up via an online form.

This will be interesting as Dell is going to have a multi-pronged attack which its direct hardware, direct services and a partner channel. It will also be interesting as to how the relationship with Microsoft pans out because I remember at the Westcoast event last year Steve Haddock placing heavy emphasis on Partners buying from Authorised Distributors who could report sales back to Microsoft from SBSC Partners. I don’t believe Dell can do this at the moment but is something they should look at doing.

What a coup for Canonical!

I don’t know if Novell were in the running but this has got to be a major disappointment for SUSE Linux. Boo hoo, nobody loves them after their faustian pact as some would say!

The Ubuntu Community Manager is Jono Bacon and is based in Wolverhampton, check out his blog. We’ll have to see if we can get him over to one our Group meetings! I have met Jono when I was trying to set up an Open Source SIG at Wmita before my “road to Damascus conversion”.

Susan Bradley is suggesting getting Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on to VPC 2007 for a trial.

I’ve never got on with Ubuntu and have had most success with OpenSuse.

That’s a good question? It’s something that an article over at The Register asks. In fact it could be broadened out to ask why not chose FeeBSD or OpenBSD? What it shows is that there is real choice out there. So when I previously said that Microsoft should open source Windows, this is not something which is without precedent for a major vendor. Sun open sourced Solaris for its x86 OS and created Open Solaris and enjoyed a bit of a rebirth and it has more recently open sourced Java. In reality the battle so far has been between Linux taking market share from various versions of UNIX, moving towards commodity Intel based servers. Ubuntu is showing some interest being generated on the commercial Linux side but it’s all funded by a wealthy benefactor in the form of Mark Shuttleworth. So, are you going to bet your business on the good will and deep pockets of a single person? My view is that you’re better off sticking with a commercial Linux vendor like Novell, Red Hat and running it on supported hardware platforms such as IBM, HP or Dell which all support these distros. It’s not going to be free as in “free beer” but you’ve got some form of insurance for your business. 

Well, I read this article and made me think that Ramon Ray, must be dealing with a different company called Dell than me! Dell competes with everyone, everything and itself! If it moves, Dell competes with it! I like the way Ray is trying to convince us that Dell really wants to work in partnership with us. Dell’s strategy is about as coherent as an un-coherent thingy - driven solely by revenue at the expense of all else! Working in Partnership?! Someone tell them that’s what companies like Microsoft, IBM and HP do. No wonder Dell has been overtaken by HP for PC shipments. It’s panic, panic, panic, if ever I saw it.

This was inevitable! Not that HP would overtake Dell but that Dell’s business model would start to crack. They are so desparate to ship more volume that my Dell Account Manager used to ring me everyday to see if my customers had decided to buy. I explained to him that Small Business customers don’t work that way and they might sit on a quote for a while and that ringing me everyday was not productive. Of course he’s based in India and he’s a very nice chap and dedicated to giving the best service he can. Problem is that Dell just don’t get it working with IT Consultants or through resellers. We’re selling solutions and our money is made on services not hardware margins, so I’m I really going to chase that customer hard to see if he’s made a decision on a cheap desktop where the margin might be £50. I don’t think so!!

I was rang today out of the blue by a very nice man from Dell (from India of course!), who said he had been assigned to be my very own Business Senior Sales Consultant. So, if I wanted to sell lots of nice shiny Dell kit, ranging from servers, desktops, laptops, storage or pdas, then I was just to let him know and he would bend over backwards to get a good deal! I informed him that I was a loyal IBM Series X server person but had no issues with Dell on the desktop!

They obviously haven’t been reading my blog posts about Dell. SShhhh! don’t tell them!

Nobody seems to be loving Dell! The Register is reporting that the mainstream press are coming down on it - big time!

Come and talk to us about IBM System X Servers, you know it makes sense and are competively priced as well.

Well, I did say they couldn’t sustain their current business model. Lets make everything appear so cheap, blitz people with our advertising and endless offers! Let’s compete on price, price, price. Do they innovate and do loads of R&D (like IBM) or do they just try and shift more and more boxes on wafer thin margins? It’s just not sustainable! I like The Register analysis of this? Dell’s excuse is that it’s the weak global economy, so I know let’s drop prices even more!

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing much wrong with their technology but on the server side there’s nothing much to get excited about. The problem is that within the small business market no one really cares about that anyway, so what if IBM servers use vectored cooling, lightpath fault diagnostics, onboard RAID 0/1 as standard, chipkill memory and sophisticated management software.

Do Dell have expert partners in the channel backed by an extensive support network and technical/sales training to deliver the right solution to your business. Not on your nelly, they are only interested in parting you from your hard earned cash and they’re damn successful at it!

Just don’t ever ring Dell and ask them how to network 2 computers together!

ZDNet UK are reporting that Dell is saying that Linux makes up 25% of it’s Enterprise Server Market. This growth is coming from Unix to Linux migrations and not Windows to Linux migrations. My understanding is that worldwide Windows Server shipments have remained pretty steady and Linux has gained ground at the expense of various Unix distributions.

This goes back to the earlier post about Linux in the small business market. It just ain’t happening, well not enough to register on various indicators. Linux is essentially a solid Enterprise offering but is replacing the legacy Unix systems. Obviously, the learning curve is much smaller for staff who have been working using Unix to switch to supporting Linux.

Makes you wonder whether Microsoft should even bother with it’s dubious “Get the Facts” campaign!