Distributor ScanSource has been expanding, especially in the UK, with a new distribution centre in Southampton and a new office in Winnersh Triangle, Berkshire. Part of the plan is a new model for partners, involving an agency model. Paul Emery, VP of Cloud Solutions and Services at ScanSource talks to IT Europa about the growing agency model which the distributor is developing and how it addresses the SMB market in particular.
“We have a mix of models, including a traditional wholesale model and Avaya is in that portfolio. And then we have a big portfolio for the agency model.”
“We have expanded our line card including a new cloud offering as we've been a long-standing distributor with Avaya for many years on an international level. Now we have launched a containerised cloud solution and have over twenty end-users already up and running a beta release. The new cloud solution addresses the SMB markets where previously I think they've seen a loss of market share to some of the competition. This allows them to be scalable from one user up to up to 400 users. We're expecting an expansion on that in the future as well.”
In fact they've teamed up with Google hosting the back-end of this, effectively creating the containerised side. It means that each customer has their own IP Office instance.
Previously it required a server footprint in a data center which made the pricing higher. The use of the Google data centres means it can be price competitive from one user upwards, he says. This is specifically aimed at the SMB market where users are driving adoption a lot faster at than in the enterprise space, he says.
The reasons for this are obvious: in the enterprise world there's usually an IT division within the company that controls and manages and maintains in-house solutions whereas at the SMB level a lot of that becomes outsourced. “The SMBs are looking more for simplification, easy business and quick deployment times and this is also about how solutions can do better while offering faster, manageable solutions and being more cost effective.”
Avaya also created a new track and new cloud specialisation program so the partners don't have to invest in the complex enterprise-only market solution.
The vendor is already a big channel player, he says. “Whether that channel is a reseller or an IT specialist of another sort such as an agent or consultant - these are the types of partners we expect to see working with this.”
“Over the last three years we've developed an agency practice where we have a couple of hundred agents working with us, now and again. Those agents are consultants working in the IT space or in the security space in the UK space and are now able to sell more solution-based or proposition solutions rather than products. When they come across an opportunity that is in a specialidation, for example in connectivity, they can ask the question about other areas such as security and then we help them close deals with our supply portfolio in all of those kind of technology areas."
Hence the expansion? “The new office is great to have and it's good to have multiple teams in one office from a productivity point of view. In terms of the additional resource that we need for this kind of model, it actually doesn't require too much work; you also need to create the cloud services team but we're able to leverage a lot of the infrastructure and resources we already have in place across not just the UK but across the whole of the whole of Europe.”
The distributor has only recently started expanding this into mainland Europe, but localisation is in place. “We are constantly running education or training so we can help the our customers deliver cloud solutions successfully. It's also what the industry is doing and how the industry is moving. And then of course more in-depth educational pieces around our suppliers’ portfolio. It's something that we do via webinars and in-house training. And so we've taken that across Europe as well. We have local and country language from all our teams in various geographies.”
