Local distributor Westcon's new offering allows resellers to buy technical or business resources in the same way they purchase a product.
Says Westcon CEO Jacques Malherbe: "A reseller can walk in and say I want this product, and that product and this, this and this service, and buy it as a package deal."
This, Malherbe says, should help build a mid-market reseller channel, something SA does not have. "We have to accept that the dominant vendors create market conditions. For example, Cisco provides super support to the Dimension Datas of the world, which has decimated the channel, leaving no room for new players. There are no players underneath the big dogs, just them and the little players who keep under the radar.
"As soon as the big vendors started realising they'd not entered the SME market, they implemented strategies to do that, here and overseas. Once they implemented them here, they realised they had no one to sell to."
Not that there are not SME end-users, just no SME channel players, he adds.
"Big vendors are only now adjusting their policies to enable smaller resellers to sell. The administrative load, for smaller players, is incomprehensible. They do not see why they should report to X vendor on a daily basis about what they sold, how many, who to and by serial number. And then there's the certification problem. It costs R30 000 to R40 000 to get certified before you can even touch the product."
Most of those who play in this space tend to the informal, notes Malherbe. They live in jeans and takkies, they know the technology and they want credit, training, marketing assistance and technical service assistance. "For example, if they get a big job that requires three engineers and they only have two, they want you to provide the rest," he says.
Westcon's new offering provides this support structure, he states. "Someone needs to build it, and inevitably it is the distributors. This is the value we add in the world."
Malherbe says the company has been slowly building its capacity over the past two years, "building the programme so that vendors can sell to SME resellers. We've been redesigning our ERP system so that resellers can provide quotes to customers using our system. Creating an eco-system of enablement around the SME reseller is the only way we are going to get [to the point where a mid-market channel exists]. It's all to do with how quickly we can get up and running; the idea is to move as fast as we can."
Malherbe says the programme will be officially launched in the near future, and that further announcements will be made in the next week or so.
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