Tech Resellers: My Quick (and Crude) Opinion
When it comes to most IT commodities, I almost exclusively use resellers. In
fact, I look for opportunities to convert to resellers and drive business to
resellers whenever possible (which may seem counter-intuitive). In fact, some manufacturers in this economy are looking
to do the same thing because they can't afford to have their own sales forces.
Only for huge ticket HW items do I try and go straight to the manufacturer (e.g., IBM,
EMC). For any SW that is truly mission-critical, I go to the
licensor.
Benefits of resellers include:
Benefits of resellers include:
- Single throat to choke (or, if you don't like that analogy, one person to hug. Easier account management, easier to control the sales process—as in a reduced number of sales staff trying to infiltrate your organization)
- Consolidated spend
- Consolidated billing
- Easier to innovate purchasing and AP process (e-catalogs, PO interface, frictionless P2P)
- Typically vendor agnostic (sometimes, my reseller sales reps tell me when a manufacturer is blowing smoke. A great example is Microsoft and my LAR.)
- Better ability to deal with down-turns than manufacturers
- Usually don't push products (with resellers, the procurement process is a "pull" process)
- Believe it or not, resellers do a better job of communicating product end of life than manufacturers (manufacturers sometimes like to hide those kinds of things)
- Highly competitive (I recommend using two resellers, like CDW, SHI, or Forsythe, at the same time to ensure competitiveness and to avoid the needs for benchmarking companies)
- Indemnification (but this can be minimized through pass-throughs and your legal team needs to figure out how to make this work vs. not make it work)
- Manufacturer will worry about direct customers first, indirect customers second (usually not an issue for me)
- Escrow sometimes gets a little complicated
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