Tooling-Up the IT Channel – Adapting to a new ecosystem

Emerging channel models

The IT channel; selling and implementing great technology from vendors to solve customer problems. The channel provides a sales engine for the vendor. The reseller makes money from reselling products and attached services. The customer operates the technology. Everyone is happy. Aren’t they?

Product resale is still an enormous market, but the channel has become a more complex place to operate:

• Growing revenues often comes at the expense of shrinking margins.
• Professional services revenue is squeezed as in-built software makes for easier hardware deployment.
• Reseller software revenues are disrupted by vendor XaaS offerings

In the age of cloud and XaaS, the relationship between vendor and channel is under severe strain. The old ecosystem of vendor, channel partner and customer may no longer be sustainable.  The ecosystem is changing; you may be wondering how you can best adapt.

The new channel model is all about the delivery to customers, not of products but of outcomes. Managed service providers (MSPs), unlike VARs, are constantly connected to their customers and add value in real time. Predatar exists to smooth the transition in moving from a VAR to an MSP model when there is an impulse for change.

Which route to take?

Predatar serves organisations with an ambition to brand and sell their own managed service. Organisations who prefer to resell various OEM XaaS offerings will need to recognise the following issues:

• The OEM owns the customer relationship
• The OEM collects and stores the data analysis about each customer
• You will probably lose professional services implementation revenue
• The OEM customer engagement platform may not allow customer data to be shared with channel partners

We assume that you want to build your own XaaS offering. Your role in this model shifts from the sale and implementation of technology, to the operation and optimisation of the technology. You will start to add true value to your customer, playing new roles traditionally performed by their in-house IT, or neglected altogether.

This opportunity does come with new risks, but only if you do not have the tools to deliver.  The tools, policies and procedures used for the old ecosystem, won’t be sufficient to get you where you need to be.  How do you know where you need to adapt and evolve?

10 signs you might need to tool-up

1. You are unable to collaborate with multiple customers through a single platform.
2. You must employ additional people to perform basic “run” tasks such as capacity management, reporting, monitoring, workload and recovery management.
3. You miss important customer engagement moments for up-selling, cross-selling and renewing contracts.
4. You struggle to measure customer outcomes.
5. Your customer usage and consumption analysis processes are not automated.
6. Service level and risk management systems are non-existent. Worse, you have no audit trail for problem resolution.
7. You find yourself having “fire-side” chats with customers rather than data-driven review meetings.
8. The tools you currently have are not easy to customise.
9. Your finance, sales and technical teams are using different tools.
10. You still rely on your OEM partners for leads and referrals.

What are we doing to help?

It’s important to recognise that a successful adaptation to the new ecosystem requires advisory services, not just software.

Predatar is the only channel transformation specialist to offer both platform and process; equipping its partners with the tools and the techniques for a lucrative evolution.

To accelerate this transformation, we are inviting partners to preview our next generation Predatar software in July. It will equip our partners with the best customer engagement platform for delivering data protection-as-a-service (BaaS, DRaaS).

A recap of what’s currently available through the platform.

Predatar provides a true multi-tenant platform for hybrid cloud data protection. It provides:

• extensive monitoring and reporting capabilities
• license management
• consumption analytics
• recovery management
• security and service intervention features.

What’s new?

In our next generation product, R10, we have built a brand-new client designed for modern, API-driven, data protection applications. This will allow our partners to connect across their different service offerings, delivering greater value-add to customers.

There is added consumption analytics capability to help you build true pay-as-you-go data protection services.

We have extended the self-service functions. The increased automation of routine and labour-intensive tasks will free up your experts to add value and focus on business outcomes.

As a Predatar partner, you won’t have to spend years coding your own MSP operating system. You don’t have to make expensive and time-consuming mistakes. We’ve done it all, so you don’t have to.

Are you ready for the new ecosystem? We’d love to hear about how you are adapting. Get in touch at https://www.predatar.com/contact-us/