Patrick Aronson (Westcon-Comstor)
In the Asian channel there’s always a race, and for distribution, the prize always appears to be relevance.
Yet the entire notion of “gaining traction” in the new clichéd world of the channel continues to irk leading distributors across the region, who tire of validating what they bring to the technology table.
Previously, the supply chain was defined by its ability to ship boxes, yet today, technology dictates the game from a value-add perspective, as the channel play centres around the intricacies of new solutions and services.
One such distributor moving at pace, and with the times, is Westcon-Comstor, in response to an evolving ecosystem across Singapore, Malaysia, and the wider Asia Pacific markets.
“Our top priority this year is to help our resellers, system integrators and service providers make more money by leveraging our strengths and unique capabilities,” Westcon-Comstor executive vice president of Asia Pacific, Patrick Aronson, told Channel Asia.
“This includes our strong technical and enablement team in Asia, of which the ratio of technical to sales staff is nearly one-to-one.
“Our Westcon business holds a unique position as one of the market’s leading cyber security experts with a full solution portfolio, while our position as a Cisco-only distributor through Comstor is unmatched.
“Furthermore, our unmatched global deployment services allow us to help both partners and vendors seamlessly deploy multi-country and multi-continent solutions for end-user customers through a single, operational interface.”
In leveraging more than 30 years of experience, Aronson said the distributor will continue to place a “heavy emphasis” on technical skill-sets and partner enablement, with a deep focus across security, networking, cloud, data centre and unified communications technologies.
From an operational standpoint, Westcon-Comstor has also completed an internal digital transformation change, following a three-year strategy to improve digital supply chain performance through automating and integrating platforms with core vendor solutions, at a regional level.
“We’ll continue to build integrations into the supply chain systems of our top customers to ensure end-to-end automation, speed and accuracy,” Aronson explained. “This change will also see a heavier emphasis on data availability and transparency.”
New technologies
The shift in focus comes as new and emerging technologies flood the channel both locally and globally, as adoption levels increase across security, software-defined and cloud markets.
Closer to home, Asian businesses are expected to go into battle in the pursuit of recruiting cloud and security expertise in 2018, as the technology industry once again faces a skills shortage.
As digital transformation deployments increase across the region cloud and security will underpin board-level strategies in the next 12 months, as organisations seek both internal and external guidance.
Crucially, customer investment plans in Asia Pacific centre around cloud, followed by security and end-user computing.
Delving deeper, Aronson said a “major trend” currently impacted the market is the “proliferation of vendors and new technologies” especially in security, software-defined wide-area networking (WAN) and cloud.
“The technical complexity of the broad offerings coupled with outcome based demands from end-users are forcing traditional channel partners to make new types of difficult choices and decisions,” Aronson observed.
“Increasingly, both resellers and technology vendors are looking at value-added distributors such as Westcon-Comstor to help with decision making, building scalable technical capabilities and removing the complexity out of the business for the entire channel.”
For Aronson, IT investments are now built around digital transformation and disruptive business models, shifts which represent fundamental changes in how partners sell solutions and services in Asia Pacific.
“Customers in Asia are no longer just the CIO or IT leaders,” Aronson explained. “They are business owners looking for business outcomes.
“This is not the traditional way of selling that the IT channel partners grew up with. Partners need to understand how to survive in this new paradigm or risk being replaced by a new breed of partners who focus less on vendor technology and more on consulting, outsourcing digital transformation.
“There are many challenges for partners and they often vary by partner type. A large global systems integrator and a small single-country reseller, for example, will often face very different types of problems.”
One trend and challenge that is true for all, however, is the coming change of the overall business model.
“This is from the single, one-time deal to the annuity based, recurring revenue model,” Aronson said. “We see this in the cloud, software-defined networks, pay-as-you-go and the LAER model, that is so often discussed in the industry.
“Making this fundamental change as a business and managing that transition is a huge challenge for all channel partners and should be top of mind for all channel executives this year.”
Opportunities
In looking ahead, Aronson cited cyber security, big data, mobility and the Internet of Things as "clear opportunities" for partners to explore in the months and years ahead.
But in speaking as an industry veteran - leveraging more than 25 years technology experience - Aronson said such trends simply fall into the “buzz word” category of hype and marketing rhetoric, with channel opportunities existing much closer to Singaporean shores.
“The real opportunities for our partners are lurking in every CEO’s board room, in every CIO’s closed door session, in every CMO’s town hall,” he said.
“The key for our partners is to understand the customer’s real business problems and pain points and once you know that, you’ll find the opportunity pipeline is overflowing.
"If our partners only go into to talk with the IT directors about their traditional IT budgets, eventually they are going to find it really tough to grow.”
Alluding to the belief that there’s a new buyer in town - with the CIO no longer the sole decision maker in the purchasing process - Aronson advised partners to expand horizons within an organisation, tapping into line of business leaders and new pockets of dollars set aside for technology spend.
In a direct message to the Asian channel, Aronson acknowledged that there is “no cookie cutter demographic” for a successful partner in the market, with the ecosystem spanning value-added resellers, system integrators and managed service providers, to consultants, independent software vendors and start-ups.
“A successful partner in my ecosystem can be anything from a global fortune 500 service provider to a small, boutique security vendor with just one customer,” Aronson said.
“The one common characteristic for success is that the partner has a clear and passionate believe in the power of the three-legged partnership: vendor, distributor and reseller.
“Together we form a complete, integrated, scalable, economic and trusted partnership build to ensure long term customer success. As soon as a partner embraces this approach they are bound to be successful in our ecosystem.”
