24 01732 759725 CHANNEL SERVICES Value at every touch point Nebula Global Services is encouraging resellers to make the most of opportunities in the physical security market after signing its first vendor partnership with Verkada It is a good 35 minutes into Technology Reseller’s meeting with Richard Eglon, Chief Marketing Officer of channel services company Nebula Global Services, before the topic of sustainability crops up – and even then Eglon has to be prompted. For Nebula, which has made sustainability a key differentiator, this is quite a turn-up for the books. Of course, this doesn’t mean Eglon is any less passionate about ESG (more on that below), it’s just that there’s lots else to talk about, notably Nebula’s first vendor partnership, with physical security specialist Verkada. Vendors are an untapped market for Nebula, which provides channel services to resellers, VARs, MSPs, global SIs and distributors. However, it is one that is likely to become more important in the future, with Eglon looking to add one or two new vendor partnerships each year. While a direct relationship with a vendor represents a new approach for Nebula, Eglon is keen to point out that it won’t affect the role of resellers and distributors in Verkada’s go-to-market. “Verkada is an AI-enabled, cloudbased physical security company offering everything from surveillance through to vape sensors inside school toilets. The surveillance market is a huge growing market, but from a technology standpoint most of it’s being delivered through local, alarm-based companies, one man and his van, who will go out and install it. The issue with that is it’s sub-scale,” he explains continued... “Verkada are selling lots of product out into the market, but to do that efficiently you need to do a site survey. In a college, for example, you might have a mix of sensors, door entry systems, cameras and you will need to know where your access points should be. You need someone to do a site survey, write a report and say ‘right, this is the product range you need and this is where it needs to be located’. That’s fine if you’re doing one college locally, but what if the client has a group of colleges across the UK? You then have to find 20 different ‘one man and his vans’.” Which is where Nebula comes in. After carrying out Verkada projects for the likes of Softcat, DMS Digital and some international businesses, it has just been onboarded by Verkada as a global, authorised Premier Services Partner. This will allow it to project-manage, install and service Verkada video security cameras, access control systems, environmental sensors, alarms and intercoms on behalf of resellers, who as a result will be able to serve more customers and increase their involvement in a market that Nebula expects to grow by 400% to 500% globally over the coming years. Go to market Eglon says one of the good things about the partnership with Verkada is that it dovetails with the vendor’s existing go to market. “Even though we’re engaging with Verkada direct, all deployments of the service we provide are done through resellers and those resellers are still buying through distribution. Distology is good at getting product out to the market quickly, efficiently and they’ve got tried and tested go-to-market plans to do that. We are a bolt-on to that. Where they’re selling product, we’re almost like a services distributor. They’ll have skus for the product line and we’ll have skus attached to that based on day rate deployments. So we’ll say ‘to install those 100 products, here’s your line item cost’. Then we’ll say, and this is what’s quite new to the market, ‘Once it’s installed, how will you support that product? What if somebody knocks the camera in the warehouse, what if there’s a fault which is not just a simple swap-out issue?’. “Verkada will do an RMA (return merchandise authorisation) to the customer site to take back the faulty part, but the customer’s not going to get their facilities manager to go up in a cherry picker and swap out that part themselves. What we will do, for a minimal cost, is give you a three-year services wrap, which will be person-to-site. We will guarantee to get somebody to the customer site the next business day to swap out that part – very much like what’s been happening in the network and server space for many years. Verkada may be offering their partners an AI-enabled, cloud-based service offering, but you still need somebody to go and physically install it and support it.” What Eglon finds exciting about the partnership with Verkada is that instead of just dealing with the reseller market, Nebula can now engage with Verkada at source and help them to define their services plan and shape their go-to-market. “What tends to happen with channel services is that third party maintainers service the reseller/MSP/GSI market and deliver a service on their behalf to the end user. They very rarely engage with distribution or vendors, because quite often a vendor sees them as competition, because they also try and do that end-of-life break-fix piece. Richard Eglon
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