Rock Stars in the UC Reseller Channel?
I recently spent 2 days battling with United Airlines to get to Chicago and then home – all for a very interesting summit focused on two segments of the reseller/dealer channel – MSPs (managed services providers) and video resellers/dealers – and how they can better work together in our expanding world of unified communications. Let me first point out that United Airlines is going to be singly responsible for the growth of the telepresence and video conferencing areas of UC! Anything to avoid flight delays and cancelled flights on UAL! But I digress…..
The summit in Chicago was hosted by CompTIA (“IT” organization) and InfoComm (video trade organization), with the program focused on identifying commonalities and disparities between the two groups of member resellers and a goal of determining how the groups could work together in this new UC landscape. Is it saying something that a Cisco employee participated? Anyway, I’ve discussed ad nauseum the differences and commonalities of the data and telecom dealer channels and the impact on UC. Now I’m seeing a new segment – video dealers – in the mix and again….differences, differences and some commonalities.
What jumped out at the summit was a picture of video dealers three-four years behind data VARs in the dealer business evolution process. Many video dealers are still selling hardware and not even thinking “solutions”. “Unified communications” isn’t even on their radar yet. Many of the dealer organizations are led by “former rock stars”, according to Randy Lemke, CEO of InfoComm; so there is a strong element of creativity and ego-driven management style but a lack of business expertise. They deal with architects on room design, acoustic engineers for sound, and professionals for room color and visual appeal. Many of them work on one-of-a-kind events – rock concerts, corporate meetings, etc. – to provide audio and visual effects. Definitely a different world from IT or telecom…. But wait! The participants at the summit were there because they want to know what’s going on with unified communications and how they can play in the game. They know that technology – even theirs – is changing rapidly and a different world is growing around them. The video dealers were openly excited about learning more from the MSPs who are moving beyond the hardware/low margins model and exploring relationships that will help both groups extend their expertise and offerings. And the MSPs were very interested in the value that a video dealer could add to their own efforts at solution building.
Wow! We haven’t even figured out – on a mass basis – how to bring data VARs and telecom dealers to a level of consultative selling and cooperation and now we’ve added video dealers into the mix. It’s going to be fun getting these new participants in the UC channel to the model that in a white paper on my own website I’ve described as necessary for success (or even just survival) going down the road.