Advantech is a $2 billion-plus sales player in the Internet of Things, embedded technology and industrial communications markets, and it is now aiming to get its channel partners to work fully with system integrators to take advantage of the growing AI services market.
At the Advantech Focused Partner Conference in Warsaw, Poland this week, the company urged existing partners to move away from simply being resellers of hardware modules, to instead partner with system integrators to offer end user full-stack solutions, that included hardware, software and bespoke industry services.
Jash Bansidhar (pictured), managing director of Advantech Europe and AVP of the industrial IoT sector, told partners: “System integrators are the opportunity to grow the solutions business, providing a bundle of hardware, software, and a combination of services and thought leadership to the end customers.
“This year, we have to fully bring in the SIs. It’s not about just selling modules any more through a channel partner. It’s about selling complete solutions to take advantage of and develop the market opportunities together.”
Bansidhar, a 21-year veteran at the Taiwan-headquartered company, said the European operation was now developing a full channel selling and development model to “professionalise” the new go-to-market in partnership with SIs.
The firm wants to bring on board global system integrators, regional system integrators, and local ones too, that can support end customers of all sizes, whether they be individual factories and other organisations at the edge, or multinational companies deploying many thousands of communications modules.
“We want co-selling and co-developing to enable the delivery and deployment of the whole solutions, and we will integrate our own Advantech sales and business development people in this new GTM ecosystem to help move things along,” said Bansidhar.
Some of the key areas to be supported in this drive, he said, were industrial AI, Industry 4.0, digital twins, green energy, and edge computing generally.
“We will ‘productise’ our software offerings with the hardware. We need to make it simpler to sell via the channel, to help take full advantage of the opportunities out there,” he added.
Various Advantech technology partners spoke at the conference, including Deloitte, EdgeLabs, Canonical, K-Factory, Orange Business, ABB, and, not least, Nvidia.
Christina Kuo, Nvidia embedded ODM sales manager, told the conference: “There is edge AI momentum being built on Nvidia Jetson, which is our SOC [system on a chip] offering, that includes an SDK [software development kit] that allows users to get the most out of our products.
“Jetson provides a one-stop-shop when our software services are deployed with modules from Advantech, for instance, which is one of our major partners.”
Jetson is a low-power system and is designed for accelerating machine learning applications. Kuo cited Jetson use cases in the industry segments including transportation and logistics, manufacturing, retail, health, warehousing and robots, and material recycling.
Bansidhar added: “We will not build AI models for you [the partners], as we are not a software company, but we will help you develop and integrate products, solutions and services by providing the right drivers and APIs [application programming interfaces] that make our modules work in the stack provided to your customers.”
He said Advantech was now planning to bring partners together in particular countries to outline how specific industries could be targeted with the new GTM ecosystem.
And he emphasised: “With this way, the customer will no longer ask you for a discount, as you are no longer just simply selling hardware, you are selling them a comprehensive solution.”
More to follow from the Advantech Focused Partner Conference in Warsaw...
