Technology Reseller - v13 2018

01732 759725 ANALYSIS 26 What resellers want the highest in the region. Where are things taking off? Well, resellers we spoke to were most keen on introducing smart home, IoT and 3D printers. The smart home is already garnering a lot of interest, with average purchases per reseller reaching PC industry levels of € 39,000 per reseller in the UK & Germany. There’s also a huge reseller opportunity in integrated systems, where average purchases per reseller jumped in the UK from € 242,000 in Q1 2017 to € 281,000 in Q1 2018. However, there are some concerning signs. While positive sentiment about the next 12 months is increasing in countries like Spain, France and Italy, and falling only slightly in Germany and Poland, UK net reseller confidence of 16% is the lowest in Europe by a significant margin, with only 36% expecting their business to perform better in the coming year and 20% thinking it will get worse. Hygiene vs value add One of the most important relationships in the channel is that between reseller and distributor. The latter will be keen to know what their partners value most. In the UK it’s all about pricing (33%), customer services (30%) and product availability (26%). This is different from the European average, which puts more focus on the B2B customer portal (43%). When asked what they missed most from their main distributor’s offering, the most popular elements were pricing (32%) and delivery costs (30%), illustrating just how much resellers value core ‘hygiene’ factors. This begs the question, how much are distributors prepared to invest and how much are resellers prepared to pay for value-added services like technical support and training? In the UK at least, there is an openness to training by distributors, with respondents in the UK more likely than those in other regions to view distributor training in sales, IoT, IaaS, DaaS, PaaS and managed print services as useful. It’s also true that resellers need to be experts not only in different technologies but also in verticals. In the UK, the biggest growth opportunities were flagged as education (16%), retail (15%) and manufacturing (15%). The vendor angle Price (57%), product quality (53%) and Adam Simon, Global Managing Director for CONTEXT, explains what the company’s 2018 ChannelWatch report says about the relationship between resellers and distributors and vendors. Where are IT resellers investing? What are they looking for from distributors and vendors? How are they preparing for the future? These are just some of the questions answered by the CONTEXT ChannelWatch report. Combining information from CONTEXT’s annual reseller survey with reseller metrics and sales/price tracking across thousands of respondents in 13 European countries, this year’s report highlights exciting but uncertain times for the channel. Strong and stable? The good news is that the reseller landscape in the UK & Ireland and Europe in general is pretty stable. Although the total number of resellers dipped slightly in most countries, including the UK, average purchases per reseller rose from € 104,000 in Q1 2017 to € 111,000 in Q1 2018. In the UK, things were even better, with average purchases per reseller increasing from € 194,000 to € 207,000, UK net reseller confidence of 16% is the lowest in Europe by a significant margin Two new reports from CONTEXT and Datto highlight the opportunities and challenges facing UK resellers and managed services providers. Across these two pages, Adam Simon and Mark Banfield highlight key findings from their respective reports Adam Simon Which cloud services have you sold in the past 6 months? With which product categories do you generate the most revenue for your business? Services PC Servers Networking Software PC components Print consumables None Back-up Storage Security Web hosting & E-Commerce Business Applications General Infrastructure 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%