Though still based in the UK, my own personal perspective is now very much from Exclusive Networks Group.  At the pan-European level, we have built a SuperVAD; a single-touch, multiple connections value-added distribution model that gives market acceleration across the continent to disruptive networking, storage, security and infrastructure technology vendors seeking to benefit and to profit from the Smarter Social Enterprise opportunity.  Germany now completes the final piece in our jigsaw, following the acquisition of the highly respected TLK organisation just a few weeks ago. No-one else can claim to be succeeding with a vision to combine the reach, logistics and volumes of a broadliner with the no-compromise approach to value and services of a specialist VAD.  No-one else seems to share that ambition, let alone have the capabilities to execute it.

What exactly defines a SuperVAD, and what does this mean for resellers in the UK?  Stay tuned; this is something to definitely cover off in more depth in a future blog post…

Essentially a Digital Immigrant (DI) is someone like me, for whom the adoption and use of technology is something I have consciously grown to understand and adapt to.  Pretty much anyone under the age of 30, meanwhile, is a Digital Native (DN); someone who interacts with software and networks as subconsciously (and frequently) as they breathe.  There is much that characterises the differences between us; the most important being that there are going to be fewer like me in future, and a hell of a lot more of them.  This is where the next generation of billion dollar business ideas is already coming from.

As IT solution providers, we all need to work out what role these types of users and managers play in the modern organisation and how they are changing the organisation’s IT decisions and functions.  Are you ready for the disruption they are causing with smart devices and social applications, or are you better suited to traditional mindsets that evaluate and implement technologies the good old-fashioned way?  How can resellers used to addressing the decision making DI’s in an organisation, factor the ‘DN’ into their marketing tactics, selling practices and consultancy?  What is the role of the junior people in your business in teaching you how to communicate with your market?  How will those conversations go if you aren’t speaking the same language? 

This is a long-term trend, so be wary of seeking the Emperor’s New Clothes and becoming blinded by theory.  One thing about us Digital Immigrants; we never ‘go back to where we came from’, and we’ll be mixing with the natives here for a long time to come.

How are you really selling cloud to enterprises?  The market as a whole has succeeded in
talking about cloud and ‘as a service’ but are you personally hiding in amongst all that cattle and – to a certain extent – all the bullshit it produces, or are you getting stuck in and gaining credibility that you actually know what you are talking about, to inspire faith from customers?

Because credibility is everything when it comes to cloud…  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
famously called cloud ‘nonsense’.  Two years later, in a U-Turn so massive you can see the tyre tracks from outer space, Larry is cloud’s biggest advocate and if you’d please buy some from Oracle then he’d be terribly grateful.

What can we do, as resellers, to make sure customers understand the value of cloud and use it to their best advantage?  By way of a new year’s resolution, how about instituting the following simple hygiene (so simple it is probably overlooked): get your sales guys into the
habit of providing two quotes instead of one, for the next 10 opportunities they bid on; one traditional quote and one that provides a hosted or ‘cloud’ solution.

You can’t argue it will get them into the habit of thinking differently, it will compel them to extol the value of cloud and SaaS or Platform as a Service (PaaS), and will earn them
invaluable experience in talking the benefits of convenience, self service, application delivery, different usage and payment models etc.

Try it, and let us know how it goes.

We all know that pubs, coffee shops and hotel lobbies are often convenient places to have a quick meeting, and we immediately assume that such places will have Internet connectivity. But does the barista have a plug socket next to her espresso maker?  Can I get a packet of 240v with my pint of 1664?  Starbucks has apparently admitted the problem threatens their ability to seat enough customers.

With universal coverage – whether expensive and untrusted 3G/4G, or managed and locked-down WiFi – we’ve come so far in 10 years with enterprise wireless, but the same of problems of manageability, security and performance still remain within many organisations.  It’s only then that the invisible network we all expect to be there starts flickering back into view.

So here’s the opportunity for resellers: to give customers a mobile IT experience that they don’t have to give another moment’s thought to, and keep the network invisible in spite of the many challenges that will – literally – show it up.

With rising energy and fuel costs, don’t expect this phenomenon to get any easier, any time soon.  Like cars, devices will have to become more fuel efficient, and also we
will see users ‘driving’ them less hard. With a car you get far more miles per gallon doing 56mph on the motorway than 97, which in one sense defeats the purpose of having such a motor in the first place.  The availability of speed has exceeded the rate that people wish to consume it, much like how – despite the mass availability of wireless connectivity – today you get people conserving more battery life by manually switching off the wireless signal that just a few short years ago they’d have given their eye teeth for. Could we even one day see the House of Commons debating the pricing of batteries in the same way as they are now doing with petrol, especially if we all start investing in electric cars?

But while moustache growing banter is all well and good while you’re in the office – the concern we’ve harboured for when our sales team have been out and about has been a different matter!

First of all: is the person you’re meeting able to see through the moustache to the person underneath? Like an enormous mole, surely it could become a distracting source of fascination?

Secondly – is the moustache creating barriers to business being done in other ways?  For instance, could its capacity to snag bits of breakfast cereal and coffee-froth disgust business associates to such an extent that meetings are curtailed suddenly or interrupted by the need to vomit?  Or does the tremendous sex appeal generated by a bushy ‘tache (to either inclination) provoke such distraction that sales orders are forgotten or swept off the table altogether?  However, the big question is – does growing these moustaches compromise your ability to be taken seriously?

One thing we have learnt is that many of the people we meet each day are taking part in Movember, and united we all stand.  This brings a commonality not just to our shared business profession, but on the trials and tribulations of growing a moustache: How will it look? What colour will it be? How long will it grow? Do we need to buy moustache wax?  Most importantly, we’re all showing our support for what can only be a good cause.

In case you didn’t know, Movember is about raising awareness around men’s health, particularly prostate and testicular cancer.  In 2008, over 37,000 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in the UK and over 10,000 men died.  Nearly three-quarters of UK men don’t visit their GP for regular check-ups.

So are we serious?  You bloody well bet we are…

I’d had my badge sent to me already, guaranteeing immediate access, but he hadn’t. Some junior at his office registered him the day before; giving him just a code for use on the day. How very 21st century?

So I hung back a minute so he could enter his code and print out a badge. The six touchscreen machines were letting through about 30 delegates per minute. Very efficient. So he punched in his and then… ACCESS DENIED. He tried it again: ACCESS DENIED. He got a hand on his shoulder as Vladimir the security guy stepped over to intervene. Uh-oh…

“Perhaps you are registered for a Premium Pass, sir?”

Aha, yes – suddenly it wasn’t so embarrassing. The junior colleague must have pulled a few strings, slapped a few extra quid on the company account for the boss. Vlad pointed him over to a different queue full of well-heeled looking folk with wheel-along suitcases. Jammy so-and-so; first class check-in, I thought, watching him strut over like Del-Boy past all the plebs.

He was in that queue for nigh-on twenty minutes!! I wandered off to the Arista stand after about two. They had a plum spot right next to the keynote theatre where Apple’s Steve Wozniak would be giving a standing-room-only address the following day. Whether that was the magic ingredient or not, Arista turned over some great leads during the event. The show was also good news for our other vendor partners Aerohive (who, along with reseller LAN3, had their own lounge where you could get free wireless access), Infoblox and Exinda. As with last year’s IP Expo, the show was very busy with good quality visitors. All the stands are more or less the same small footprint, meaning a level playing field for getting your message across concisely – not unlike Twitter I suppose…

As normal at trade shows nowadays, you couldn’t move an inch without someone zapping your badge with a barcode reader. Most exhibitors were serving up content via QR codes as well, enabling anyone with a camera on their phone (and a free app) to hoover up info for later, rather than carry bags full of paper around all day. Another example of mobile devices’ encroachment into the enterprise data environment – a value-added distributor somewhere needs to help resellers with security solutions to protect that!

I caught up with my mate from registration later on in the day and asked him what perks his Premium Pass got, other than a 20 minute wait (rather than a 12 second stroll through).

“I get to queue up again for some free cold coffee and fight over a plate of free sandwiches with all the people I waited outside with,” he moaned. “But I did get free wireless.”

In my book – if you have to pay for it, then it ain’t free. And if you have to wait for it, then it costs even more.

However, one area of the business economy that is nowhere remotely near going backwards, is information.  Be it mandatory storage space for compliance purposes, the proliferation of video-based content and collaboration, user-generated content going across the enterprise network caused by social media, deluges in reporting data etc. etc. – information is just exploding in size.

This is the dilemma of “Information Inflation”: at no point in the foreseeable future will the adoption of information witness recession.  Yet, every other IT budgetary consideration faces austerity measures that would make the current Eurozone debt crisis look like a gambling addict’s night out in Vegas.  Costs are pressured, headcount is frozen, space is restricted, IT needs to cut its cloth, but information is just the opposite.

So if money is tight at the same time as information is shifting like the proverbial hotcakes, how can resellers ensure they get in on the act?  The answer isn’t greater scale of the same old solutions – who’d create budget for that?  No, it’s about consolidating hardware,
automating processes and accelerating applications.  Be innovative, people!  Gartner – who advocate this approach – even came out last month suggesting IT departments should just ‘get rid of stuff’.

And what of mobilisation of users and the protection requirements of data?  Don’t get me
started (that’s a another blog topic)!  It’s all adding to the melting pot and creating challenges to enterprises that want to compete effectively, let alone keep their heads above
water.  You can be part of the solution – don’t be a part of the problem!

Achieving that isn’t about telling them how secure your cloud offering is.  First you must remind them how they already depend upon ‘cloud’ for much that they do; how much they trust it without knowing it’s even there.

Putting sensitive data off-site is an unquestioned instinct already.  It’s where everyone chooses to broadcast their Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn presence from, store mobile voicemails, access webmail, and consume entertainment services.  Are your customers comfortable with that?  Yes, it’s so convenient.  It’s disarmingly convenient.  And anyway, no-one ever vexed them with the knowledge they were putting it ‘in the cloud’, even though, any fool can see, that’s exactly where it is.

Sky TV has made a multi-billion pound business out of providing recurring cloud-based services, and conditioning millions of subscribers to repeatedly upgrade and buy value added premium services on top.  Think about it.  Think about how much sensitive data they are trusted with.  Think about how they deliver those services; where they reside; how they are charged.  Customers don’t think about it; they don’t feel they need to.  Customers lap up those services because they were sold on convenience, not cloud gibberish.  And they’ve since experienced how reassuring that convenience has been.  It is not because they were convinced by some complex technical argument about security.

So let’s imagine a guy who picks up both his highly personal and business critical Vodafone voicemails out of the cloud without thinking twice; he’s the same guy who won’t touch Google Docs with a bargepole.  Someone needs to rearrange that reassurance for him, and the reseller who does can reap the rewards.  (Incidentally – in spite of the recent phone-hacking scandal I would wager than none of the phone networks has lost a single subscriber over the fact that their cloud-based service delivery system was so easily and consistently compromised.  Work that one out…)

Here’s some homework: go and find the word ‘cloud’ on Sky TV’s website.  Good luck finding anything that isn’t in the ‘weather’ section.

Ultimately, I believe, much like high street insurance brokers, record shops and book resellers, there will far fewer VARs knocking about in five years time.  In terms of commoditised IT sundries like capacity, storage, communications, processing power, applications and software etc., these could all be bought by the individual user (rather than the company) through self-service portals that are dynamic, secure, and stretch-to-fit.  You never know, in five years time we may be buying support renewals on moneysupermarket.com – now there’s an idea!

Count yourself lucky because you’d be facing a far worse state-of-affairs in America.  Over there, channel players have already been getting squeezed out of business by more than just progressive cloud-delivery business models.  To avoid that fate, resellers need to cement their presence with customers by always looking to constantly add value.

And besides, it’s not five years from now yet.  In the meantime the channel has to pursue a dual approach, and not like the US where directly appointed VARs exist merely to act as fulfilment houses, adding little or no value.   The UK IT market still very much relies on the scale, reach and customer relationships that the reseller brings.  Long may that continue to be made to count for real value…

I’ve experienced acquisitions working elsewhere in the past, and what’s characterised almost all of them is the concerted onset of ‘takeover’, as familiar processes, working practices and – most importantly – the culture and buzz gets slowly assimilated by the dominant partner in the transaction. Quite sad really, but not inevitable. Certainly that’s the direct opposite of what Exclusive and VADition together envisage.

The acquisition – coming as it does after just five years of extraordinary success since VADition was set up from scratch – vindicates the vision we had from the beginning, and the delivery of that vision will continue. Mass collaboration, automation, cloud, IT consumerisation, the social enterprise; anticipating the market; driving demand for our committed partners; adding value into big margin opportunities… The tie-up with Exclusive sees us sticking to the guns that got us this far, and joining forces together, rather than throwing away what’s been achieved thus far and rolling over.

So where are we going next? Well keep reading this blog. But in the meantime, rest assured that our outlook on the market is becoming more and more cognizant of the ‘mobile’ social enterprise. All enterprises are continually evolving, and must cope with the dramatically increasing scale and complexity of the traffic on their networks generated by user-specified, application-drenched smart devices, both from a security and a management perspective. We’ll continue helping our partners to evolve too.

You should only stick to your guns if you know they’re any good. Ours are locked and loaded, and aiming straight at the next challenges and opportunities to come.