EQUIPMENT & PERIPHERALS
Staying Power
The evolution of technology over any
With more and more business applications transferring to the cloud the hardware markets are in overall decline.
However, this is not the case for all sectors where some markets are seeing solid performances and even growth
is not uncommon
period clearly has an impact on the
reseller community and none more so
than on their core activities. e 1980s
and 90s reseller is typically very di erent from
that in the 21st century.
Early in the evolution of the channel
resellers moved on from their initial single
product or solution premise they based their
organisation around and branched out in
various directions adding on peripheral
and ancillary products to boost sales and
pro tability. A portfolio was established
which in turn evolved as core technologies
themselves moved on.
e importance of the reseller portfolio
should not be underestimated as the onboarding
of new products could not be
undertaken lightly. e process involved
lengthy and often annual accreditation for
sales and technical sta that cost real money
and time. Choose the wrong products and it
became expensive too in terms of losing sales
opportunities.
Get the portfolio right and it would earn
its keep in the form of;
• Extra margin opportunities from
peripherals that would frequently support
the seemingly always under price pressure of
their core activity equipment.
• Enabling a structured approach to selling
successfully in to niche markets.
• Providing a so called ‘one-stop-shop’ for
users that preferred to limit the number of
the suppliers they deal with to keep their
admin costs down and reduce the number
of throats to choke if something goes
wrong.
• Making customers sticky through selling
any user a number of products makes it
more di cult to shift to another supplier
for any one of those supplied – particularly
if multiple products are bundled in a single
price.
Much of this ‘good portfolio’ bene t
actually remains the case today whether
products and applications are provided on
site (CPE) or as a hosted or cloud-based
deployment.
In the case of the PBX market, which
in its CPE form has declined over the last
decade and continues to erode at around
8-9% each year, it became inevitable that
many associated hardware products have also
declined. However, products such as headsets
and handsets for example remain buoyant
– softphones have not really taken o in the
o ce environment but are more common for
mobile or remote workers.
Most applications that are provided today
via the cloud were born in the cloud – there
are and never were CPE versions.
e main applications markets that were
exclusively served by CPE solutions that
have been impacted by moving to the cloud
yet still retain a CPE presence could be
considered as being:
• Data Back-up and Storage
• PBX based Telephony
• Contact Centres
• Uni ed Communications
• Video Conferencing
It remains the case too that many users still
consider having the ability to reach out and
touch their CPE applications as being a muchneeded
security blanket and that any thought
of moving any mission critical business
process o site is more than their job is worth.
All of this is understandable but gradually
being chipped away over time.
Telephones
Market consolidation
has reduced channel
choice to a degree in
recent times, but it
would also be fair to say
that a new supplier with a
factory in China also seems
to appear on the scene on
a regular basis to increase
the choice. What is clear
is that relatively
little has
changed
with
the
core
functionality of phones – they make and
receive calls, and nobody knows how to
access more than a handful of their more
advanced features. Ask any ten workers in
an o ce how to set up a conference call and
you’ll prove the point.
e rise of VoIP has increased the
demand for IP and SIP phones, but this
has been obviously at the expense of POTs
(remember them – the Plain Ordinary
Telephones?) ere’s only a net increase in
telephone sales when the overall market for
phone systems grows.
Yet this is good news for resellers as the
frequent result of a static phone platform
market is discounting of the telephones and
vendors run to price and bundle promotions
as their di erentiator of choice.
Conferencing
e market for conferencing has undergone
rapid change of late. Firstly, the market seems
to have nally realised that the opportunities
to sell large, complex room-based video
conferencing solutions is really quite limited
in the face of nimbler desktop and mobile
solutions that are actually simple to use.
e drivers for these simpler and personal
solutions are many. For instance, we are
being urged, loudly and constantly, by the
proponents of working in multi-discipline
collaborative groups (rather than departmental
silos) that the bene ts of such a change in
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