Channel links urgently required

Confidence in technology's ability to deliver real value to business is at an all-time low.

What we need are vendors who appreciate the need to sell business solutions, not just boxes, together with genuine value-added services from resellers to encourage IT directors to partner with the channel.

Vendors need to concentrate on selling direct to enterprise customers. They should leave the resellers to interpret their technologies for medium-sized firms that, with less purchasing clout and IT skills, have too often been sold expensive systems that cannot support their evolving business goals.

Instead of multiple brand managers pushing individually branded products at customers, vendors should brand themselves according to their core strengths: R&D, manufacturing or delivery, for example.

Customers would not then be besieged by salespeople, and vendors could concentrate on winning long-term loyalty by perfecting existing technologies, rather than rushing the latest buggy product to market for a one-off sale.

Externally, vendors need to trust the channel to interpret technologies to suit business needs, and empower business partners to have a direct relationship with end-customers.

The channel itself needs to learn more about end-customers' businesses, so that technologies can be more closely mapped onto business needs.

In turn, IT directors need to trust resellers and co-sourcing companies enough to partner with them to solve business problems, a potential lifeline when IT headcount freezes are starting to bite.

The channel can not only find the right technology to meet business needs, it can also manage individual pockets, in areas such as operating systems and data storage.

Users should create partnerships based on mutual gain, and see the channel as an invisible extension of their businesses rather than a systems shop. Meanwhile, the channel must stop paying lip service to business needs while secretly targeting IT directors as juicy prey.

If we fail in this, vendors will continue to under-perform, the channel will shrink, the IT director's job will vanish.

And we will never win back the credibility of the investment community on which the future growth of the UK IT industry depends.

Mark Simmonds is general manager of Anix Group.

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