Technology Reseller v07

technolog y reseller.co.uk DATA SYSTEMS 37 Things certainly feel more competitive in some situations, and I think the cloud’s going to have more of an impact as the years go by 5 There’s no such thing as a typical NexStor customer, and that has helped the company weather tricky economic conditions “Over the last 10 years, we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t have a typical customer. This can make marketing difficult, because when we speak to an outsourced marketing organisation they want to know how we categorise our customers – is it by turnover, by how many staff they’ve got, by how many sites they’ve got? Yet, some organisations have petabytes of data and only a few people working there. “What we are after is organisations that have a lot of data and problems managing and storing it. That could be a small post-production house above a shop in the West End or it could be a large supermarket. Our customer base ranges from Deutsche Bank to the local comprehensive school. “Because we have got such a broad customer base, the last recession in 2008 didn’t impact us too much. We do sell to the public sector and we have noticed budgets being tightened there, but again, being a small agile company we can adapt to these kinds of shock and turn it to our advantage. For example, by saying why are you buying your maintenance off X when we can do it for you 40% cheaper, with the same SLA.” 6 To support rapid growth, it is important to work with distributors that have flexible credit limits “We’re not a huge company, so even if against two or three other resellers, with two or three other vendors. Now, we are competing against three, four or five vendors, plus the cloud. It’s like having another reseller on the block, chasing after the same bit of business. Things certainly feel more competitive in some situations, and I think the cloud’s going to have more of an impact as the years go by.” 8 There are things vendors can do to make your life easier, but ultimately you need to choose partners you like doing business with “We are a reseller, so we always want more margin and we always want more leads – that’s been a consistent message for 30 years. Generally, we are quite unscientific in the way we pick new vendors. The main factors are ‘Do we like the technology?’ and ‘Do we like the people involved in the organisation?’. If the answer to either question is no, then we don’t deal with them. “When we initially heard the news that Nimble had been bought by HP, like probably every other Nimble reseller we were aghast, because HP is a big organisation and is viewed as being, not difficult to work with, but big, slow, cumbersome. We found completely the opposite to be true and that’s because of the people. “The Nimble team and the HP team have been in several times and plug us into the right individuals within HP, which has really smoothed the transition for us and helped us to register deals and maintain decent margins. We’ve been very pleasantly surprised with it and are putting as much effort behind it as we can because we’re getting that feeling back from HP. “We have a great relationship with all of the vendors we work with today. Other than passing deals to us every five minutes, which they can’t do because they’ve got other resellers to serve, there’s not a lot more they can do. They give us products to sell and they give us marketing dollars to go and sell them. It is then down to us to bring some value back to them and not just be the reseller that sits there with their hands out all the time. “Some of the larger resellers are so big they’ve become used to being spoon-fed fulfilment business. We’re not like that, which is why vendors are attracted to us. We’re very proactive.” we are doing multi-million pound deals, we’ve not got a multi-million pound credit limit. So it’s key to work with distribution partners that have the right approach to credit management. “We work with Arrow and Hammer and they’re really flexible in terms of letting us go over our credit limit. Provided we can prove that there’s not a lot of risk in the deal, they’re more than willing to be flexible. That really is key; having a good relationship with your suppliers, as well as your customers, because ultimately they can turn the tap off. “Distis are trying to improve the service they offer. More now than ever, we feel we get some value out of the distis, in terms of lead generation and extended credit terms. In the last three or four years, there’s been more competition in the market and Arrow and Hammer who we deal with quite a lot have risen to the challenge.” 7 The cloud is increasing competition and is going to have more and more of an impact in the future “Over the last year or two, we have had customers say to us ‘This may well be our last storage or backup refresh; we may well go to the cloud in five years’ time’. A lot of organisations have gone through a process of looking at what can go to the cloud, so whereas we once might have sold them a 100 TB SAN, suddenly it’s a 50 TB SAN because they’ve stuck 50 TB up in the cloud. “So the cloud has had some impact. Five or 10 years ago, we were competing