ALEX TATHAM FEATURE
“If you are not monitoring your
customer’s business then you will
lose out. Someone else will provide a
managed service if you don’t!”
PREPARATIONS FOR BREXIT?
“I’m delighted to talk about Brexit, however what I say will be out of date by the
time people read this! The overall message is we have been preparing for a nodeal
situation for the past year because that is what Her Majesty’s Customs and
Excise told businesses to do.
Some of the work is going to be temporary, i.e. stocking up. Unfortunately
you can’t stock up forever, we are just doing it to get us over a hiccup. That is
largely to do with delays, I haven’t met a shipping agent or logistics company who
doesn’t think they are going to be horrendous delays at port. That will affect the
IT industry as much as the cabbage industry. Stocking up is all about getting over
that hiccup so both governments, the UK and EU, can prep their port facilities
so these things can happen quicker. I think it will get better over the subsequent
years to follow.
Clearly it’s costing us money and time to handle this. However, if it wasn’t
Brexit it would be something else. Normally it’s a vendor causing us problems
because they have changed their terms and conditions. It happens all the time!
All partners can do is advise their customers there are going to be delays. If
you have something configured to order, which a lot of servers are, by a vendor
in Eastern Europe, those goods still have to get across The Channel. My advice
to resellers is to make sure you are working with your distribution partner to
ensure you can store goods and roll them out, and to make sure you are buying
from Channel stock as opposed to configured to order stock.”
hybrid cloud environment. Westcoast
is investing in the multicloud software
along with HP, HedVig and Juniper. This
is to ensure we can manage multicloud
environments and move workloads
across clouds, containers, on-premise,
off-premise or wherever is needed.
It’s a really important part of a reseller
armoury, they need to be able to manage
the workloads.
If resellers aren’t involved in the cloud
at all then they will get muscled out of
the end user. They must start talking
to their customers about their cloud
strategy. Technology and connectivity
is improving all the time and it really is a
journey for customers. If a reseller is not
involved in that then they will lose.”
The impact of those born in the
cloud partners are also starting to
show, Tatham added “Our biggest cloud
resellers are selling to some of the
biggest companies in the country. The
reason they can do so is they don’t have
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