ARN Q3 2019

Q3 2019 | Vol. 24 No. 3

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Contents 6

Q3 2019

VOLUME 24_ISSUE 3

Analysis 10

Time for partners to leave the past behind As technology budgets become increasingly squeezed, innovation and a change-focused mindset have now become imperative to the channel, according to EDGE Research.

Pressure-cooked optimism The channel is facing another challenging period with margins and revenue squeezed, and the promise of cloud not as it seems. Yet EDGE

In-depth 6

Unleashing ‘Frankensteinian creativity’ in the channel

themselves to face the changes ahead.

Creating a winning culture

Welcome to the channel layer cake

As managing director of Odgers

In a climate of heated competition and

In the opening keynote address

Berndtson — a specialist recruitment

increased specialisation, Jay McBain -

of EDGE 2019, globally renowned

firm — Tim Sleep assessed what

principal analyst of global channels at

trend-spotter, Magnus Lindkvist,

makes an effective technology

Forrester — documented the multiple

outlined how the channel can

industry leader.

layers of customer engagement now in

prepare for an age of never-ending change.

Research shows partners are steeling

play for the channel.

A view from the other side

Building a product from the ground up

Marketing technology, automation

Josh Devenny — principal product

coming together and changing the

manager of Atlassian — detailed the

historical lines of business for IT

key credentials of a product building

partners. In view of that, how can

business.

CMOs and CIOs work together with

and customer experience are

the channel?

Features 40

Creating a data-driven advantage in Australia

Dicker Data TechX 2019

arnnet.com.au Q3 2019

Editorial

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

MANAGING DIRECTOR barbara simon

barbara_simon@idg.com.au

EDITORIAL editorial director: james henderson james_henderson@idg.com.au

head of news: samira sarraf

samira_sarraf@idg.com.au

senior journalist: julia talevski

RN and Reseller News launched EDGE 2019 in July, as the fifth running of the leading channel destination conference across Australia and New Zealand. Centred around Build, more than 320 C-level executives came together in a collaborative and educational environment, through an action-packed conference featuring in-depth local research, compelling business streams and structured networking. Representing the entire ecosystem, EDGE 2019 housed more than 170 partners, spanning New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, in addition to ACT, Western Australia, Northern Territory and New Zealand. All types and tiers of partners were represented, from start-ups, independent software vendors and consultants, to managed service providers, system integrators and value-added resellers. Backed up by 44 vendor organisations and 12 distributor businesses, attendees joined forces to connect, learn and collaborate in the pursuit of profitability and growth. The hunt for new customers, the longing for brand awareness and the desire to differentiate stand tall as the three overriding priorities for partners in 2019.

Unmistakable aspirations perhaps, but for the channel the sense of urgency is now more immediate. Yet such a checklist remains grounded by constraints around resources, budget and legacy, with the heavy burden of reality extinguishing any hopes of true transformation. The channel recognises that change is required, but partners lack direction and execution, creating a need for viable strategies and roadmaps. Hence EDGE 2019, which laid out the building blocks for attainable future growth in the channel, backed by local research from Tech Research Asia. In this special edition issue, we outline how partners can build a sustainable base of new customers; build a viable marketing strategy; build long-lasting unique IP; build stronger internal practices and build a deeper support ecosystem.

julia_talevski@idg.com.au

senior journalist: sasha karen sasha_karen@idg.com.au

journalist: eleanor dickinson

eleanor_dickinson@idg.com.au

graphic designer: robbie insuasti robbie.insuasti@gmail.com

photographer: christine wong

info@christinewongphotography.com

ADVERTISING group channel director: eduardo silva

eduardo_silva@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2769

sales director & associate publisher: cherry yumul

cherry_yumul@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2756

account director: blayne reilly-sealy

blayne_reilly-sealy@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2753

events manager: amy woodhead

amy_woodhead@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2775

data and campaigns manager: nik gorbachev

nik_gorbachev@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2784

marketing and events coordinator: christine wong

christine_wong@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2737

print production: jackson raddysh

jackson_raddysh@idg.com.au (02) 9902 2778

idg founder: patrick j mcgovern

JAMES HENDERSON EDITORIAL DIRECTOR â&#x20AC;&#x201D; IDG

Editorial published in ARN may not be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission. Copyright 2019, IDG Communications ARN is published by IDG Communications Pty Ltd PO Box 1753, North Sydney, NSW, 2059. Phone: (02) 9902 2700 IDG is the publisher of ARN and its website (www.arnnet.com.au). If you choose to accept offers, enter competitions or complete surveys contained within them you may be required to provide information about yourself to IDG. IDG will use this information to provide you with products or services you have requested, and may supply your information to contractors that help IDG to do this. IDG may also use your information to inform you of other IDG publications, products, services and events, or give your information to organisations that are providing special prizes or offers and that are clearly associated with the offer. Unless you tell us not to, we may give your information to other organisations that may use it to inform you about other products, services or events or to give to other organisations that may use it for this purpose. To gain access to the information IDG holds about you, please contact IDGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Privacy Officer at IDG Communications Pty Ltd, Level 10, 15 Blue St, North Sydney, NSW, 2060.

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

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Magnus Lindkvist EDGE 2019

UNLEASHING

‘FRANKENSTEINIAN CREATIVITY’ IN THE CHANNEL

IN THE OPENING KEYNOTE ADDRESS OF EDGE 2019, GLOBALLY RENOWNED TREND-SPOTTER, MAGNUS LINDKVIST, OUTLINED HOW THE CHANNEL CAN PREPARE FOR AN AGE OF NEVERENDING CHANGE — ELEANOR DICKINSON REPORTS.

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

EDGE 2019 Magnus Lindkvist

Earlier this year, hordes of thrill-seekers were pictured waiting in a snake-like queue at the crest of Mount Everest, each holding out for a selfie atop the world’s highest point. Some observers were aghast. The climbers were, to quote Magnus Lindkvist, “reaching for somebody else’s dream”. “And sadly, people died waiting in parka jackets,” he said. “Think about where we go on vacation. You can go wherever you want; you can go to Siberia or Sudan. But increasingly, we all end up in the same places, Dubrovnik, Venice and so on.” Lindkvist’s opening remarks on the channel’s potential travel plans may have seemed unorthodox. But the Swedish trendspotter’s initial message pointed to a wider discussion running through the annual destination channel conference: fighting against sameness. “Rip off and duplicate — it’s what people do,” he said. “Thinking for yourself is difficult. So, if we can just copy, it’s safer. There is a risk management aspect to it and it’s not just the business. We do it in our lives. And if you reach for somebody else’s dreams, you’ll end up in an eight-hour line on the top of Mount Everest.” Lindkvist, who describes his job as “travelling the world, talking, thinking and asking questions”, was alluding to the overall event theme of Build, and how the channel in Australia and New Zealand can create attainable growth for years to come. And the only way to achieve this is for partners to build better and more unique versions of themselves.

PHOTO BY CHRISTINE WONG

Making meaning

In the age of religious belief and centrism, finding life’s meaning was either by means of a bible — for those that could read that was — or a priest. However, in today’s era of cynicism and scepticism, that meaning has become harder to find, and now humans are turning to other forms of panaceas for their existential crises: Netflix, Spotify, weekend breaks and endless marathons. “All the movies you will ever need, all the music you can ever listen to and the occasional weekend trip to a beach for less

than $300 has increased possibilities in life,” Lindkvist said. “However, we used to have lots of meaning. Why do we live? Why do we die? What’s life about? This was given to you by ancestors and it is all but disappeared, which explains the number of marathon runners in the world.” In a sense, the channel is also running its own kind of marathon, although at times it can appear like a sprint. As the trans-Tasman market becomes increasingly digitised, with cloud replacing servers, software replacing hardware and the rise of everything-as-aservice, channel partners have a long road of change ahead. But in order to meet that wave of change, internal transformation must take place within the channel — and that must come from the top-down, argued Lindkvist: “My best leadership advice: if you want to build intellectual property, brand and a customer base, strengthen your leadership and make meaning. It’s the scarcest resource we have in the 21st century.”

Pressing the wrong button

But where one goes to find meaning is the big question. As Lindkvist said: “We go to the same places. We look for the same ideas. We hear the same reports and we get the same ideas about the future.” Unfortunately, that rinse and repeat mentality has its roots in a place of both anxiety and fear. The same fear that stokes uncertainty about “evil” technology companies and ultimately any kind of business experimentation. And in the end, that will be the technology companies’ downfall. “No company ever went bankrupt from experimenting,” Lindkvist said. “The way big companies go bankrupt is by doing the same thing for too long. In the words of Nancy Sinatra, they keep saming when they ought to be changing. Learn from the near-death experience of failing massively. “Experimentation is how we learn. Trial and error. Nothing is sustainable. Everything works for a little while. You don’t experiment to succeed. You experiment to find ways that don’t work.”

“No company ever went bankrupt from experimenting” As an example of how breaking the rules pays off, Lindkvist pointed to Per Gessle, the lead singer and songwriter of the 1980s Swedish band, Roxette, who, while trying to work out how to use his new synthesiser, decided to throw the manual away — a big step in 1988. “If you bought technology, it came with very thick, poorly written, pamphlets that you had to read because you could destroy the computer by pressing the wrong button,” Lindkvist said. Undeterred, Gessle decided to experiment with his new machine and began randomly pressing buttons — and, in doing so, accidentally set off a bassline he couldn’t switch off and ended up pulling out the cable. However, that bassline inspired him to write one of Roxette’s biggest hits, She’s Got the Look. “If Per enjoyed reading manuals, we would never have had that song,” Lindkvist. said “Sometimes [you need to] let go of conventional wisdom. The answer is not necessarily more information, more education. It can just be – let go, try. Experiment: press buttons at random.” With experimentation, comes creation and collaboration, according to Lindkvist. And the channel should not underestimate itself when it comes to its creative potential — something he calls ‘wizardry’. “You are an industry of Frankensteinian creations,” he said. “A part from there, a little bit from here, another bit from there — we put it together to create something. We need to take things from the edge into the mainland and the world is changing in interesting ways. “Take creative optimism, power and put it into the world, not just for the individual prosperity of your company, but so that all of us have bragging rights in the future.”

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

Thought Leader EDGE 2019

“Traditional, rigid business structures are melting away”

Vicki Batka (Cisco)

Focusing on customer experience to ‘perform and transform’ For those of you that follow the geopolitical and macro-economic events around the world, you would be very well aware that, there are unprecedented disruptions shaking the very foundation of traditional and wellestablished industries. Traditional, rigid business structures are melting away – and being replaced with new agile and dynamic business models. The emergence of these new business models coupled with even more competitors and changing customer demands, are pressuring organisations to review business models and ensure sustainability – ultimately to figure out how to do more with less resources. Disruption is coming from everywhere and we need to not only understand but also embrace this change so that we can act upon it. So how can businesses large and small gain the upper hand against the competition? The answer is by delivering an aweinspiring customer experience. This remains the imperative for a business to survive in these times of digital transformation. If you take any industry from hospitality

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

and airlines, to e-commerce, logistics and even banking – there is very little in terms of product differentiation, and in such cases, customer delight becomes your primary advantage. Customers have a wide array of choices when it comes to selecting the right technology to invest in and often go with the best the market has to offer that fits their budget. Customer experience and delight has become as important as the product itself. Moreover, the first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations. A digital and seamless customer journey should be a guiding principle of a business’ digital strategy. Companies need to have a well-defined digital transformation strategy and roadmap. They need to use this as a guide to make strategic technology investments, ones that help them address key challenges and leverage specific growth opportunities. As we look at the different vectors that are influencing businesses in the digital era, the foundation of that is a secure, intelligent platform.

Technology managers are managing dynamic variables — users, devices, applications and data that are changing by the minute or even by the second. Users are accessing critical applications from networks where IT sometimes have little or no visibility. Our customers are facing the most complex and dynamic IT environment we have ever seen and with 5G a multidomain approach is required through the integration of the service provider, the data centre, campus, branch, cloud and most importantly security throughout.

‘Perform and transform’

The opportunity for Cisco partners is bigger than ever before and is represented by four key trends: digitisation is a reality that drives infrastructure spend; the increasing shift to the cloud is requiring a fundamental change in how companies run their entire infrastructure; the technology spend of line of business buyers is surpassing IT budgets; and customer experience is becoming one of the most important differentiators. As big as these opportunities are, it’s tempting to rush in and capture the new growth they represent. But that can put meeting your weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals at risk. What’s needed is striking the right balance of running your daily business while – at the same time – preparing to transition and capture these new opportunities for tomorrow’s growth. Cisco and our partners are best positioned to take complete advantage of these opportunities as we look to be the bridge between our innovative technology and customers through our partner ecosystem. Vicki Batka is vice president of partner

organisation Asia Pacific and Japan at Cisco

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10 Customer EDGE Research 2019

PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE WONG

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

EDGE Research Customer

AS TECHNOLOGY BUDGETS BECOME INCREASINGLY SQUEEZED, INNOVATION AND A CHANGE-FOCUSED MINDSET HAVE NOW BECOME IMPERATIVE TO THE CHANNEL, ACCORDING TO EDGE RESEARCH ELEANOR DICKINSON UNCOVERS KEY FINDINGS. A wealth of unprecedented change has swept across the channel in Australia and New Zealand during the past five years, reshaping the dynamics of the market in the process. In 2019 however, the market is finally starting to stagnate. Or at least, that’s the overriding customer sentiment, according to newly released EDGE Research findings. Amid a cost-conscious economic climate, the channel now faces the uphill task of remaining innovative and willing to embrace change at a time of increasingly tightened purse strings. As outlined via EDGE Research, technology budgets have flattened in 2019, with half of customers not intending to increase spending, coming in stark contrast to only 22 per cent last year. Around 46 per cent plan to increase budgets, again in sharp contrast with 74 per cent 12 months prior. With channel turnover and profit expectations also expected to remain relatively static compared to last year, greater pressure is now on vendors and partners to “truly

“For any tech partner focusing on selling business outcomes and value, there shouldn’t be a significant, detrimental impact,”

know” the inside workings of customers in the modern-day market. “Knowing the customer” however is no longer a case of having a conversation over a social drink with a CIO, warned Tim Dillon, founder and director of Tech Research Asia. As businesses attempt to enhance transformation efforts, new technology demands and business models are falling on different departments, reducing the IT department’s hold on budgets.

Today, less than a quarter of that technology spend sits with the IT team — 23 per cent in total. For Dillon, that number is now surprising: “It’s a welldocumented trend that various analyst organisations have been calling out now for multiple years,” he said. “Line of business tech spend has been consistently increasing for many years and the added rise of ‘shadow IT’ outside of formal budget activity has also contributed to this,” he said.

Customer tech budgets in 2019:

46%

51%

3% Increased

Flattened

Decreased

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

12 Customer EDGE Research 2019

Who’s got the tech budget?

HR LEGAL

6% FINANCE

OTHER

SALES

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

18%

11% 13%

23%

OPERATIONS MARKETING

“Line of business tech spend has been consistently increasing for many years and the added rise of ‘shadow IT’ outside of formal budget activity has also contributed to this” The remainder of technology expenditure is relatively evenly split across an organisation: operations have the next biggest chunk with 18 per cent, followed by sales, finance and marketing at 13, 11 and nine per cent respectively. Notably, “digital transformation” is now its own silo, and holds onto nine per cent of technology expenditure, a number Dillon noted was “much smaller last year”. However, as Dillon also pointed out, the phrase is problematic: “Digital transformation is not simply taking what you do now, which may be quite bad, then re-polishing it and calling it digital,” he said. And today, the fragmentation of technology budgets has so far raised more questions than answers for the channel.

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

“Am I duplicating?” asked Dillon. “Am I creating additional effort? Am I creating complexity? Am I actually increasing the amount of spend that I may actually have on technology compared to what it would be if it’s centralised?” If one thing is certain, however, is that there has never been a more critical time for partners to focus on customers and selling them tangible solutions rather than just products. Such a change however will require a significant shift in channel business models. “For any tech partner focusing on selling business outcomes and value, there shouldn’t be a significant, detrimental impact,” Dillon explained. “But those who are clinging on to box dropping or refusing

to change their commercial models to reflect ‘as-a-service’ consumption models are going to hurt the most.” Tim Dillon (Tech Research Asia)

14 Customer EDGE Research 2019

Tech

‘Repatriating’ the cloud

Breaking down the investment priorities on a technology front, EDGE Research revealed some surprising trends. In particular, the catapulting of networking and SD-WAN to the top of customer priorities from its tenth position last year. Cloud, last year’s number one priority, was subverted to third position as data centre activity remained in second place. This juggling becomes less surprising when in view of the 47 per cent of customers who were looking at cloud “repatriation”. According to Dillon, this predominantly stems from customers going from public cloud into their own private hosting environments. Much to Dillon’s disappointment, the main reason, or “excuse”, for this was due to security fears. “We’ve been talking cloud security forever,” he acknowledged. “It was an excuse, but it still persists now after 10 years plus and talking about cloud.” Other areas of dissatisfaction were an increase in costs and a lack of intended efficiencies. The former, Dillon admitted, is inevitable: “You don’t save money from public cloud predominantly,” he said. However, the blame lies on the channel for customer inefficiencies: “This [data point] shouldn’t really exist if the job was done properly. The workloads shifted were

2019

2018

Network/SD-WAN

>10

Data centre expansion

Cloud migration

App integration

Security

Big data/analytics

Developing new apps

>10

Digital transformation

Digital workplace

Managed services

not ‘cloudy’: they shouldn’t have gone. You have to take responsibility for that.” It was not all doom and gloom from a cloud perspective. As Dillon added, there is “still a tremendous amount of opportunity in cloud” from organisations that have not yet migrated from on-premise environments. “But there is a shift towards looking more

CLOUD PLANS

“There is a shift towards looking more intelligently at clouds”

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

On-prem

Colo/private 2018

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

2019

intelligently at clouds,” he said. Meanwhile, despite a torrent of malware and ransomware attacks hitting organisations across the world, including Australia and New Zealand, security fell from third to fifth place on the agenda. Application integration was up from seventh place to fourth, while big data and developing new apps took sixth and seventh place.

Public 2021

Forming the tail-end of the list was digital workplace and managed services, both of which experienced steep drops from their ranks last year, four and six respectively. “The focus on innovation projects, the early investment in areas such as automation, machine learning and AI as well as the ongoing pursuit of digital transformation programmes are all contributing to budget activity,” Dillon explained.

EDGE Research Customer

Customer problems with partners • Not understanding timing for procurement • Failing to follow procurement guidelines • Not providing consumption based pricing • Poor account management/ communication • Not providing outcome or risk/reward based pricing • Not providing sufficient business case support

“The rate of increase is slowing however compared to the previous year as some organisations look to either restrict costs or consolidate programmes.”

Channel sentiment

With regards to customer sentiment, the overall feeling from the customer research was a sense of disappointment. As with previous years, main pain points and concerns related to procurement reigned supreme at end-user level. In particular, partners not understanding customers’ timing for procurement or failing to follow procurement guidelines were the most pressing issues. Failing to provide a consumption-based (or as-a-service) pricing structure was third among customer gripes, while not providing outcome or risk/reward-based pricing was high on the list. “Essentially, customers want better commercial models from their suppliers,” said Dillon. As ever in the trans-Tasman technology industry, talent and skills remain an issue. Asked whether partners were skilled enough, 57 per cent of customers gave a resounding no. Essentially businesses felt that partners and solutions providers did not have the deep capabilities to support both their

“The rate of increase is slowing compared to the previous year as some organisations look to either restrict costs or consolidate programmes”

needs, and those of their own customers. Delving deeper into research findings, competition remains a driving force behind this shortfall as the channel competes for security and cloud migration experts, plus applications developers. Alongside heated competition was the glaring issue of the Australian IT industry’s lack of diversity. Partners’ themselves pointed to this within the EDGE Research, claiming diversity targets were hard to achieve while also taking note of their organisation’s “unappealing” work culture. Yet despite this, partners displayed a reluctance to address diversity problems, with 60 per cent claiming their own business did not need a diversity program. “From the data, yes we do need diversity programs,” Dillon said. “If we were to put the lights up right now you’ve got a middleaged white man talking to a room, mostly made up of white men.” Other areas included poor account management and communication or a failure to provide sufficient business case support. “The channel should not be doing what they are already doing,” he added. “They should be doing what I say they should be, was the customers’ feedback. They met their contractual obligations. But it overall was an underwhelming list to read.”

Andrew McQuarrie (Ooh!media) and Rowan Dollar (Department of Human Services)

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

16 Thought Leader EDGE 2019 Rob Rae (Datto)

Why the MSP market is about to explode When deciding to embark upon the establishment of a small business, it’s generally because you have a great idea or there’s something that you excel at. Managing an IT infrastructure doesn’t always come into that equation. Just as a start-up wouldn’t typically have an accountant or a lawyer on their staff, the same principle now applies to their IT infrastructure, The idea of outsourcing IT and paying a recurring revenue fee to a managed service provider (MSP) is becoming more common than in the past. MSPs are optimistic about their market, not only because of the current state of play but also the tremendous growth opportunity that exists. MSPs are on top of the new technology that’s hitting the market and the threats associated with them. While the tech world is getting scarier and cyber attacks are increasingly prevalent, these scenarios are precisely what MSPs are trained to deal with, so they are able to protect businesses more effectively than an internal employee who may not have the proper training.

Reactive to proactive IT management

Previously, the primary role of the IT department, aside from managing and updating the infrastructure, has been to respond when the end-user has an IT issue. Now, the IT industry is shifting to a more proactive form of management, housing the ability to predict when systems may be at risk before they are, based on certain behaviours. In an environment that becomes increasingly cloud-based, we can use machine learning to predict when things may go awry.

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

We can analyse applications and know when they will need to be fixed. We can also look at software licences and predict how many businesses will need, when they will need to be upgraded, and so on, so organisations can plan and budget accordingly. With a proactive IT management strategy and using machine learning to identify anomalies in operational data, MSPs can address these issues at the earliest opportunity.

SaaS reimagined

Modern MSPs take a holistic look at business infrastructure, identifying everything that is producing data, and asking how valuable is that data, how long do you want to save that data for, and in an emergency situation, how quickly would you want to recover it? This is where the idea that supporting more of what the end-user is doing, as opposed to the applications the MSP has sold to the end-user, is critical as we move forward. While IT is complex from a technology

“MSPs are on top of the new technology that’s hitting the market and the threats associated with them” standpoint, it’s even more so from a security perspective, with the frequency and creativity of cyber attacks now a major concern for enterprises of all sizes. Large businesses, with their in-house IT teams, are not always fully prepared for security issues. This is where larger organisations can benefit from having a co-managed IT set-up, by outsourcing the external component of IT to an MSP. It is these factors, both at the SME level and the enterprise, that underscores the optimism in the MSP market, as the industry is set to experience huge growth in the coming years, which will benefit the entire tech industry. Rob Rae is vice president of business

development at Datto

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18 Partner EDGE Research

PRESSURE-COOKER OPTIMISM

THE CHANNEL IS FACING ANOTHER CHALLENGING PERIOD WITH MARGINS AND REVENUE SQUEEZED, AND THE PROMISE OF CLOUD NOT AS IT SEEMS. YET EDGE RESEARCH SHOWS PARTNERS ARE STEELING THEMSELVES TO FACE THE CHANGES AHEAD ELEANOR DICKINSON REPORTS.

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

This time last year, the consensus was that the channel had never had it so good. Positivity and buoyancy radiated across budgets, growth and optimism. Fast forward 12 months, and according to EDGE Research findings, the market is looking a little less optimistic. As the cost of doing business increases, partner revenues are decreasing with profit becoming increasingly “squeezed”. More than half of partners in the channel made a loss within the last year.

EDGE Research Partner

FINANCIALS & OUTLOOK Revenue change during the past 12 months Business expectations in next 12 months

35% 30% 25%

18%

20% 15% 10% 5% 0% -30-39 -20-29 -10-19

-1-9

0-3

10-19

20-29 30-39

40+

Profit change during the past 12 months

77%

30% 25%

POSTIVE

NEUTRAL

NEGATIVE

20% In the next 12 months, investment in your business will...

15% 10% 5% 0%

>-9% -1-9%

1-9% >10%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

INCREASE FROM CURRENT CASH

INCREASE FROM EXTERNAL FINANCING / CAPITAL

INCREASE USING CURRENT PROFITS

EVALUATING M&A OPPORTINITIES

PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE WONG

NOT PLANNING INCREASE

Around a third experienced a shrink in revenue of up to nine per cent, while another third collectively reported declines ranging from 20 to 40 per cent. Of the remaining who encountered growth, the grand sum of this was minimal: a quarter said growth did not even hit 10 per cent. “Last year, things were extremely positive,” said Tim Dillon, founder and director of Tech Research Asia. “The optimism specific to enterprise budgets last year was very high in terms of

increases. Three quarters of partners reported an increase in revenue, very few had a decrease and very few were flat. Things were bullish; there were a few hiccups, but on the whole, the market was very optimistic. “This year, things are a little different. The enterprise is still up, but the rates are lower. If you dig into the data, the issues are the same: compensation is increasing, the cost is increasing and skills are more expensive. It’s harder to compete in certain markets.”

In times like this, however, it may come as a surprise that many - 77 per cent of the channel - are feeling positive and optimistic about the next 12 months. And the majority of partners intend to increase the amount of investment in their businesses - four out of five in total. But this is not a sense of misplaced hope or optimism, argued Dillon, but the result of partners steering towards a changing landscape, both in terms of business and technology.

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

20 Partner EDGE Research

Changing times

Arguably one of the biggest changes to impact business operations is the transition towards as-a-service models, a shift that has its own relevance to the channel. EDGE Research noted that if at least 40 per cent of a partner’s revenue comes from as-a-service, chances of “solid” profit growth improved. Although this is only one data point, Dillon acknowledged, it’s one that “stands out” against partners who have not yet transitioned away from more traditional

commercial models. “Customers are increasingly sophisticated with their understanding and approach to buying ‘aaS and the channel and vendors have also broadly moved to accommodate this too,” Dillon said. Yet on the flip side, it was also notable that partners have made a transition into as-a-service but have less than 40 per cent of their revenue coming from it, were finding it harder to grow their profit margins. Of course, as Dillon pointed out, traditional versus as-a-service models isn’t a “binary” issue: at the end of the day,

“Customers are increasingly sophisticated with their understanding and approach to buying ‘aaS and the channel and vendors have also broadly moved to accommodate this too”

customers are looking ultimately for a “blend” that suits their needs the best. It’s up to the partner to be flexible enough to accommodate those needs. “If this means 100 per cent ‘aaS for some deals and a mixture of more traditional commercials with ‘aaS for others than that’s what they want,” added Dillon. As a result, he concluded, partners become much “stickier, easier to work with and much more invested in their customers”. From a technology product perspective, artificial intelligence and machine learning topped partners’ spending agenda for the upcoming year, followed by industry technology and then 5G. Virtual assistants, distributed ledgers and robotic processing automation (RPA) software rounded off the priority list in the next 12 months. The channel’s priorities, for the most part, were aligned to those of their customers, which were led by: 5G, virtual assistants, AI/RPA and industry tech. However, businesses are also

TECH PRIORITIES: ‘SPECIAL PROJECTS’

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

CHANNEL FOCUS

CUSTOMER FOCUS

AL/ML

5G solutions

Industry tech

Virtual assistants

5G solutions

AI/ML/RPA

Virtual assistants

Industry tech

Distributed ledger

Reality tech

RPA

Wearables

EDGE Research Partner

showing interest in reality and wearable technology, something that appears to have sidestepped the channel’s priorities. On the whole however, EDGE Research findings looked promising, according to Dillon. Although industry-dependent, for a partner looking to adjust their spending priorities, Dillon suggested starting with automation for a “broad brush”. “After that partners should be looking at melding multiple solutions together such as AI with edge analytics and 5G to create real-time solutions in areas such as manufacturing or health and safety,” he said. “It’s not so much a single ‘special project’ technology but what can be created through various combinations of different technologies.” The problem, however, lies in the fact that more than half of customers revealed they felt their partners and solutions providers did not have deep enough skills and capabilities to support their expectations in the midst of these new priorities.

Clarifying cloud

In 2019, a discussion about channel technology trends would not be complete without the word ‘cloud’. Despite its apparent status as the biggest shift to hit the channel since the internet, according to EDGE Research, by 2021, 48 per cent of businesses will not even be using it in any form. A fifth of businesses meanwhile are not planning for cloud, while 47 per cent of companies that are making, or have made, cloud migrations, plan to transition from public cloud to private cloud or even to on-premise. This reversal in the appetite for public cloud comes from a mix of factors, including costs and security. Also, there is now a growing cynicism toward moving workloads to the cloud simply for the sake of it. “There was a general lack of suitability of the workload [migrated] to a public cloud infrastructure meaning it probably shouldn’t have moved in the first place. “As one CIO told me: ‘If it’s rubbish on-

Top channel opportunities in cloud • Application modernisation / integration • Security • Multi-cloud • Data and workload migration / portability

premise, simply moving it to the cloud means it will be rubbish there too’,” Dillon said. Yet there is of course still opportunity, most of which can be seen in application modernisation and integration. Security also remains a big focus, as does multicloud, which has led partners to evaluate their go-to-market strategies. It all depends on where the customer is at in their cloud journey, explained Dillon: for those late to cloud then it’s

infrastructure migration, while those more advanced are seeking integration and workload or data management.

“If it’s rubbish onpremise, simply moving it to the cloud means it will be rubbish there too” Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

22 Partner EDGE Research

PARTNER SKILLS PRIORITIES In comparison, business recruitment priorities

Technical: Cloud migration, management

1. Application development: Software design, development, modernisation 2. New tech: Artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning 3. Security: Design, architecture and implementation 4. Cloud: Migration and management 5. Customer experience

Sales (> 5 years experience) Senior managers (sales and/or services) Solution consultants/industry specialists

Go-to-market

As a positive takeaway, EDGE Research revealed overall business satisfaction with the channel has increased. More than 40 per cent of customers reported increasing satisfaction with their primary channel supplier, and a further 10 per cent said this had increased “significantly”. The feeling was clearly mutual as 53 per cent of suppliers stated their relationship with their vendors had improved in the last 12 months. However, partner priorities in terms of vendor relations remains evenly split: a third claimed they had no intent to change vendors, while another third planned to switch out some of their vendors, though keeping the same solutions, as the remaining third plans to take on new vendors in new solution areas. In terms of value, partners said they wished to have more simplified licensing and pricing to integrate into offerings and systems, plus more marketing and customer-focused material. On the flip side, there was a push against incentivising vendor sales representatives to push technology without clearly explaining the correct market fit. They also called for an end to offshoring

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

support and more level-one support approaches to highly skilled partners who are seeking escalations. Finally, they hoped to gain more transparency from the vendors about their activities, which was found to be lacking while partners were being asked to “share everything”. As a parting message, Dillon said it was time for the channel to focus on the basics: balance sheets, communicating value to

customers, building partner-to-partner relationships and being aware of their customers’ customers. “Ït’s basics,” he said. “The drivers, revenues, customers costs because that’s what the enterprise are focusing on in a titling economic environment, particularly in Australia,” he added. “It’s a hackneyed phrase, but unfortunately, it’s very true. Where is your true value?”

How has your satisfaction with your primary channel supplier changed this year?

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Decreased significantly

Decreased slightly

Stayed the same

Increased slightly

Increased significantly

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24 Jay McBain EDGE 2019

WELCOME TO THE CHANNEL LAYER CAKE IN A CLIMATE OF HEATED COMPETITION AND INCREASED SPECIALISATION, JAY MCBAIN — PRINCIPAL ANALYST OF GLOBAL CHANNELS AT FORRESTER — OUTLINES THE MULTIPLE LAYERS OF CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT NOW IN PLAY FOR THE CHANNEL — ELEANOR DICKINSON REPORTS. A new wave of investment is flooding the channel, with customer dollars flowing through the supply chain at pace. That’s the good news anyway, according to Jay McBain, principal analyst of global channels at Forrester. The bad news? Where this money is going — and who it is going to. This is far from simple anymore because the age of the single trusted advisor is long gone. Simply put, nobody owns the customer anymore. Consequently, one of the biggest channel shake-ups is the reduction of the partner’s one-time role as a key trusted advisor to the customer. Now, according to

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

McBain, most customers will have multiple partners, across different solutions and lines of business. “There’s no single throat to choke anymore,” said McBain, when delivering the closing address of EDGE 2019. “There’s no single partner-to-customer relationship. Nobody owns a customer anymore. There are just too many things going on.” McBain claims selling an average cloud solution today, whether Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Salesforce, comprises of seven layers. To be precise, a seven-layer cake of a conversation representing a layer for every specialisation.

In terms of opportunity, the numbers are staggering: Salesforce needs 250,000 new partners globally, Microsoft is likely to add another 90,000 to its 400,000-strong network this year and AWS’ channel size continues to double each year. Using these numbers, McBain estimated that 35 million partner conversations are happening in the marketplace every day. Huge numbers, yes, but McBain said that doesn’t mean there are 35 million potential customers in play. Given the levels of specialisation required, the one partner-per-customer scenario has

EDGE 2019 Jay McBain

been replaced by a “partner-to-partner understanding”. “How do you align yourself to fit in with all of the other people?” he said. “Next time you go to a customer, start flipping through the guestbook — if they allow you to. Look at all the names.” As a result, partners will have to refocus their sales and marketing efforts to be able to handle the numbers at stake.

New decision-makers

From a technology perspective, the fastestgrowing enterprise software industry is robotic processing automation (RPA), which is reflected in the marketplace. The top vendor — in terms of growth — is UiPath, which has achieved more than 5000 per cent growth (compared with 2016) and reached US$200 million

marketing, you spend 51 per cent of your time on technology,” McBain said. “If you run sales, if you run operations, whatever you do inside your company, you’re now spending more than half of your time on technology. It’s creating a different mix and it’s creating a completely different world in terms of where we’re going. “It’s not just a technology decision: you have to install, implement and integrate it. You need to secure it, get it compliant, have disaster recovery in place and different levels of continuity built into the data. It’s a big conversation.” According to Forrester’s research, more than half of company executives are bypassing their own internal procurement and going directly to their own choice of channel partners. And there are 297 “suburban districts” — or specialisations

through distribution or distribution itself,” he predicted. “How to get presence and relevance in those conversations again, at that scale level [means] the biggest challenge becomes the math.” According to McBain, Microsoft is consolidating its three marketplaces into one, and by 2023, 17 per cent of all business-to-business dollars will go into these portals, amounting up to “trillions of dollars”. “The marketplace becomes the hub of the ecosystem, so we need to look at marketplaces in a couple of ways,” McBain said. “One is perhaps running your own micro-marketplace; the other is becoming successful in other marketplaces, whether it’s by Salesforce or software. In this era, the real winners will be the SaaS companies.”

these leaders require from the channel. Despite diversification within the channel, some executives are reporting that they are still unable to find partners offering the necessary specialised services.

McBain’s key piece of advice to the channel was specialise — and publicise it. Declaring it on Google is a good starting point, he said, and from then on “page one” of the marketplaces. “There’s wanting to chase word of mouth and referrals, but digital now provides access to new customers,” he argued. “Once you specialise, once you get into those different areas, it’s about being able to grow your business and looking at marketplaces and ecosystems both internally and externally. “Wherever that customer goes in their digital journey, make sure they come across you five different times and five different ways. That’s going to be a big part of succeeding in the future.”

PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE WONG

“If you run sales, if you run operations, whatever you do inside your company, you’re now spending more than half of your time on technology” in annual recurring revenue, according to sources cited by Business Insider. This is a metric used by software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to reflect subscription revenues. According to McBain, the New York-based vendor is now the largest artificial intelligence (AI) company in the world, growing through “tens of thousands of partners”. Such increasing demand for automation has its roots in the rise of customer relationship management (CRM) software over the past 10 years, and the procurement shift from the CIO to line-ofbusiness. For the channel, this has driven both change and opportunity. “In late 2018, we crossed over this chasm where if you’re a vice president of

Marketplaces become ‘the hub’

The increased need for such services is not the only problem the channel is facing. Perhaps even more worrying is the rise of vendor marketplaces, which pose a potential threat to distributors. Although 73 per cent of customers are currently buying through the channel, McBain expects this to change. “They are going to be customer-facing marketplaces, and not [accessed] by partners

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

26 Thought Leader EDGE 2019

Preparing for a data-driven future In the fourth industrial revolution, data is the new currency. The insights we get from mining this data powers value for customers and market dominance, but like other currencies, you can’t just generate it out of thin air. Data is valuable because you need to combine human capabilities with technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to make sense of it, which requires investment in the tools of digital transformation. Standing-still is not an option. Cloudnative organisations continually redefine the way we work, challenging the tried-andtested brands. In response, the established players must reinvent themselves. No-one wants to be selling film when everyone is using digital cameras. However, transformation isn’t easy, it requires focus and strategy. Dragging applications into a cloud native world is gruelling and there are many ways to tackle it. Consequently, organisations don’t want to go it alone, they need strong partners to help. This presents significant opportunity for system integrators and resellers. Your role is to develop solutions that represent a true transformation of what the organisation wants to achieve. For instance, modernising applications can be done by re-platforming onto newer infrastructure or shifting portions to the cloud. But unless doing so will provide new ways to market to and interact with

“The next step that creates a significant opportunity for partners is to help organisations create a cloud efficient infrastructure” Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

customers, and develop new revenue streams, it may not address the core of the problem. Perhaps the most daunting approach is redeveloping all-new cloud native applications from scratch. But it’s often the best approach compared to refactoring or purchasing a SaaS product that requires heavy modification to reach the desired outcomes, given how technology is changing operations.

Consultation to partnership

Our role firstly is to help organisations understand which workloads are critical, which ones should be retired or replatformed, and most importantly, which workloads should be cloud-native to drive the future for the organisation. The next step that creates a significant opportunity for partners is to help organisations create a cloud efficient infrastructure. Multi-cloud is the future. So why not standardise what the cloud looks like? We should drive simplification

by leveraging standardised platforms, optimising the software defined data centre with consistent operations and automating the infrastructure using API’s. Finally, there’s perhaps the most difficult opportunity: transforming operating models to take advantage of a cloud-native world. We need to think digitally, to define the APIs required and translate that into new services running on cloud native platforms. That’s why many customers are changing who they hire, recognising that there is a need for “full stack architects” who understand everything from the infrastructure layer to the business outcomes and services delivered to the customer. Unsurprisingly, these people are unicorns. Luckily, partners can help. It’s easier to find a strong partner who can guide them through this process. There are many opportunities in this, but partners and SIs need to transform to make this a reality. It’s not just consulting; it’s developing your own IP. To help our customers realise the potential in their data, we must focus on the workload and the application. It’s not just re-sell anymore. Damian Murdoch is pre-sales manager

of Australia and New Zealand at Dell Technologies Damian Murdoch (Dell Technologies)

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Thursday 19 September 2019

w w w. a r n n e t .c o m . a u / i n n ova t i o n _ awa r d s

28 Thought Leader EDGE 2019 Geoff Wright (Huawei), Colin Hu (Huawei) and Nadia Cameron (CMO and CIO)

We are HERE TO STAY It’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that Huawei has received near unprecedented media coverage over the last year – if it was not already then Huawei must now be one of the bestknown technology companies in the world. However, from a local point of view we have not let ourselves get distracted by the media attention, we have a big job on our hands working with our partners to cement our position in the Australian enterprise market and that is where we are focusing our attention. Our partners are not interested in media headlines. They are interested in what collaboratively we can do to add value to their customers. While our global revenues were US$105 billion in 2018, twice those of Cisco, few people would know this in Australia, nor would they know of the sheer physical scale

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

and sustainability of the Huawei business or that even during the headwinds in the first half of the year, we grew by 23 per cent year-on-year. In Australia we have three business groups: • A Consumer business focused on mobile handsets and laptops • A Carrier group which works collaboratively with carrier partners such as Vodafone and Optus • An Enterprise group selling infrastructure solutions — such as storage, servers and networking — to both public sector and commercial customers nationwide into a range of verticals Our Enterprise business in Australia is on a fast growth path and we have made the decision to be partner led, in actions as well as words. The Huawei channel strategy is based on profitability, predictability and transparency.

“Our partners are not interested in media headlines”

We don’t work with every partner. At Huawei we believe in deep relationships with a smaller number of partners, allowing us to invest together, differentiate our joint offering and of course make a profit. We’ve been investing in developing the channel team and building the resources for our partners to use. As you’d expect a company like Huawei is never going to be satisfied standing still and that is why we are investing $18 billion this year in research and development, up from last year’s $15 billion. A large slice of that went into investigating artificial intelligence (AI) and incorporating this technology into our products. At Huawei we are creating a full range of AI chipsets that are in everything from our phones to our networking, storage and server products. As well as making our own chipsets, we also manufacture all of our own solid-state drives and have set many of the top speed records for flash storage as a result of these two elements. Huawei is not like other vendors and I invite you to join us to be part of our vision to build a connected and intelligent world.

Geoff Wright is vice president of channel and

commercial sales at Huawei Technologies

30 Atlassian EDGE 2019

BUILDING A PRODUCT FROM THE GROUND UP

ATLASSIAN IS A DARLING OF THE AUSTRALIAN TECHNOLOGY SCENE, BOASTING A MULTI-BILLIONDOLLAR SOFTWARE EMPIRE AND A RAGS-TO-RICHES STORY TO MATCH. JOSH DEVENNY — PRINCIPAL PRODUCT MANAGER OF ATLASSIAN — OUTLINED THE KEY CREDENTIALS OF A PRODUCT BUILDING BUSINESS DURING EDGE 2019 — ELEANOR DICKINSON REPORTS. Atlassian founders, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, famously built the company from scratch fuelled by credit card debt and instant ramen noodles, to its current value of $50 billion. However, in the 17 years since its first inception, project management software wasn’t the only thing the Australian-born business was building. As explained by Josh Devenny, principal product manager of Atlassian, the company’s success is underpinned by a culture of trust and openness that allowed it to build its blue-chip portfolio. The first block in that process was building the right teams. “The ironic thing about teams is that teamwork is really, really hard,” Devenny said. “How do we keep them motivated? How do we improve employee happiness?” This starts from the hiring process itself, with Atlassian viewing people with the traits of “missionaries”, not “mercenaries” as being the ideal fit. “They’re driven by their action,” Devenny explained. “They are internally motivated to come to work and internally motivated to solve the right problems. They run the marathon, and they’re thinking about the right steps to get to the destination that they’re going to.”

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

Key to this mentality is shifting focus from just quarterly outlooks to long-term planning, from three years to 10 years. In addition, they dedicate themselves to making customers’ lives better, instead of focusing on what competitors are doing. And most crucially, they are people “obsessed with making a contribution” both at work every day and making a difference in the world.

Culture of openness

Hiring a good team is one thing, the real challenge comes from creating a working environment devoid of mistrust, competitiveness and petty politics that are the plague of almost every workplace. Prevention is better than cure, as Atlassian found. Therefore, before new employees even put their feet under the desk, they are walked through the company’s core values of being transparent and sharing through teams not individuals. After this, new employees are instructed to write an introductory blog post about themselves, sharing interests, family, photos and pets. As well as introducing teams to their newest co-worker, it helps foster a sense of familiarity across Atlassian’s global workforce, which now spans 3,000 employees and nine offices in six countries.

“There is an all self and a work self,” Devenny said. “We believe the best workplaces create space for people to bring in their whole self to work. They invite a diversity of thought and opinion and create opportunities for everyone’s voice to be heard. That’s how you build trust and satisfy that same need for every team.” At corporate level, openness also comes from a culture of sharing everything from leadership down through the ranks. According to Devenny, 90 per cent of company information is available and searchable by all employees. An example being Atlassian’s recent financial results, whereby a breakdown was shared to staff, with all the highs and lows visible, before making them public. Finally, on the subject of openness, Devenny pointed to fostering an environment that is “open to feedback” and “constructive criticism”.

EDGE 2019 Atlassian

“Frustrated managers are obsessed with products and seven-time founders are obsessed with the distribution” “We asked the whole company what we should do,” he said. “Back then, we were much smaller, and we had over 200 responses and hundreds of votes. “Lots of people contributed ideas that the leadership team could then follow, and it was a great way to see the whole company coming together and sharing ideas. When we work open, we unleash the full potential of all teams.”

PHOTO BY CHRISTINE WONG

When to start building

Once the team is in place, then comes the first challenge in building products: solving the right problems. “We can build a thousand things, a million things, but unless we’re building the right thing and actually solving the

problems of people, it’s not worth it,” Devenny cautioned. To overcome this, the teams at Atlassian regularly carry out “problem framing” exercises to help understand the particular customer pain points at stake, rather than simply creating products for the sake of it. Such exercises involve group sessions where team members are divided up to try and solve an issue at each stage of the supply chain. The aim is to determine which of these stages actually houses the real problem. By focusing on the issues from the customer perspective, the Atlassian crew also gains a sense of the client’s “emotional” state at each stage.

“It’s about figuring out what tasks people are doing and looking at the pains they have throughout their process, whether they’re happy or sad,” Devenny said. “If you have a product that doesn’t actually matter then customers are not going to switch.” Following this, the next stage for Devenny is thinking about distribution — an issue that recently hit Slack, which was until recently the world’s fastest-growing enterprise product, until Microsoft stepped in with Teams. In a short space of time, Microsoft Teams has grown the product to 13 million users, largely through an existing network of Office 365. The same can be said for Facebookowned Instagram’s cannibalisation of SnapChat, added Devenny. “Frustrated managers are obsessed with products and seven-time founders are obsessed with the distribution,” he said. “And the reason seven-time founders are obsessed with distribution because they know that if you make a great product, you need to make sure you’re figuring out who you’re going to get your product to and how you’re going to do it in a sustainable way.” Even Devenny admitted defeat when faced with a great product but a limited market for distribution. “I built a product last year that had plenty of time and thought,” he recalled. “We took it to a couple of thousand beta users. It was a great product and we had great feedback. “But unfortunately, the distribution didn’t really work. We had people we would reach out too, but we couldn’t do it in a sustainable way.” However, for the channel and independent software vendors without the global domination of a company like Facebook or Microsoft, Devenny highlighted that the Chrome and Android marketplaces present good opportunities for reaching billions of people, even though the competition may be somewhat heated. “Play to your strengths,” he added. “Whether you are building a new product or you’re building on an existing one, think about the approach that you want to take to market.”

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

32 Tim Sleep EDGE 2019

Creating a winning

CULTURE

AS MANAGING DIRECTOR OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND AT ODGERS BERNDTSON — A SPECIALIST RECRUITMENT FIRM — TIM SLEEP OUTLINES WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY LEADER — ELEANOR DICKINSON REPORTS. Tim Sleep recently came across an Australian technology company of which a wristband bearing the slogan, Pressure is a Privilege, was part of the uniform. Apparently, its CEO “honestly thought it was a good idea”. “Around Australia, if employees at this company aren’t wearing the band, they’re deemed to be not on the team,” said Sleep, addressing EDGE 2019 as managing director of Australia and New Zealand at Odgers Berndtson - a specialist recruitment firm. “You’re not giving your all, you don’t believe in the cause, because you don’t believe Pressure is a Privilege.” Sleep has met many CEOs who have what he calls a FIGJAM approach to management – an acronym for F*** I’m Good, Just Ask Me. “These people are typically middleaged men,” he said. “They typically walk around with their trousers pulled up too high and they say things like, ‘what is your commitment?’. These are the least endearing traits in a leader but, unfortunately, they’re still around.” The trans-Tasman technology sector has endured its fair share of such leaders, according to Sleep, however, there are signs within the regional channel that other senior managers are now asking the right questions about corporate culture. “Creating a good workplace culture requires a certain level of leadership

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

introspection,” he said. “How do you create an inclusive workplace? How do you make it safe or feel safe, psychologically safe, for people to come to work? How do you make it non-hierarchical so you can listen to ideas from all of your staff? How do you communicate with your staff? It’s all about setting a winning culture.”

Communication is key

In short, Sleep said people expect “direct communication” with their leaders. That means direct, and not in the manner of a Japanese company which expected its entire workforce to listen to its monthly town halls by podcast, which was tracked by monitoring staff log-ins. “What happens is nobody listens to the podcast,” he said. “They are either texting people, getting on with stuff on their phone while the podcast is playing on their screen, or, even worse, they are wandering around the office. But they need to have been seen to be logged in.” Conversely, he mentioned a global CEO who is said to be so approachable that employees would be comfortable emailing him with their issues. “The CEO is happy to get that email and he’s happy to respond,” Sleep explained. “I said: ‘That’s amazing. How many times have you done that?’ And the person who told me said, ‘never’. But the point is, he was so inspired he felt that was the level of

PHOTO BY CHRISTINE WONG

personal and attributable contact he could have with his global CEO.” Creating a safe environment where staff feel they can come to work “being their true and whole self” is key to this. “It’s an environment in which people can speak up and not feel hierarchical,” he said. “If you can create that safe environment, you are a long way towards having that culture we all strive for.” No matter the vertical, diversity is a common buzzword but in IT, an industry in which largely white, older men have been in place for decades. Today, it has become more of a pressing issue. For Sleep, diversity is more than just a gender conversation. And while it is an important area, he is keen to broaden the wider discussion. He said the starting point is simply “recognising differences”. “If you get to the stage, as leaders, where you and your teams are celebrating how different people are, watch those introverts come out of their shell, the demeanour, the spring they will have in their step, and

EDGE 2019 Tim Sleep

“If everyone feels they’ve had a voice, been listened to and contributed to that strategy, it is incredibly powerful” the contribution they will make to your business as well,” he said. “Move from recognising to celebrating differences. Start with inclusion and then diversity will follow. I’m absolutely convinced that diversity does produce better outcomes for business.”

Common purpose

When managing teams and projects across different cities, or continents, keeping a sense of unity within the workforce can pose a significant challenge. But keeping a team motivated to do its best work is imperative for both attracting and retaining talent and aiding long-term growth. Picking the right people in the first place is vital, according to Sleep.

“Given the things that are outside of our influence, it is always good to consider: ‘Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there? Who do we want to be along that journey?” Employing the right kind of leaders is a key part of that equation. In particular, ensuring they are “genuinely independent” people who can make well-informed choices about who to hire. “If they can say ‘I don’t think they’re a great fit; I know you’ve worked with him before, but I’m not sure’, it will give them a final chance of succeeding,” Sleep added. “It will also give you more chance of being an authentic leader in the eyes of your leadership team and their teams.”

Once they are in place, then the next step is to keep them united on a single, common purpose, Sleep said. “You need to get everybody in an environment where they feel that they can, they want to contribute and it’s facilitated to make sure there are outcomes and actions,” he advised. “If everyone feels they’ve had a voice, been listened to and contributed to that strategy, it is incredibly powerful. “When it happens, company senior executives often say it was the moment that the organisation was transformed to one in which the staff were aligned.” The bottom line is that being a successful leader means leaving the FIGJAM mentality at the door. “Being a FIGJAM does not change the results in your quarterly or monthly outcomes at all,” Sleep said. “Instead, focus on making a difference in retaining, in driving and delivering results and on the customer and partner outcomes. And think about the new breed of leadership because it’s a winning one.”

Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

34 CMO EDGE 2019

A VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY, AUTOMATION AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ARE COMING TOGETHER AND CHANGING THE HISTORICAL LINES OF BUSINESS FOR PARTNERS. IN VIEW OF WORK TOGETHER WITH THAT, HOW CAN CMOS AND THE CHANNEL? ELEANOR DICKINSON REPORTS. Consolidation of technological roles has been a recurring theme across the channel for some years now. With the dawn of cloud and the rapid evolution of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, technology decisions are no longer made exclusively by the CIO. Analysts estimate that between 6875 per cent of technology decisions are driven by line-of-business, reframing conversations the channel is used to having with end-users. A notable industry flip to emerge is the rise of the CMO amid a

Nadia Cameron (CMO)

climate of major business change. “Digital transformation has clearly disrupted the market,” observed Nadia Cameron, publisher and editor of CMO. “Social, mobile analytics and cloud components have contributed towards that. With digital transformation, there was a no-man’s land in organisations prior to that. “CMOs or marketing functions were responsible for some of the website stuff while traditional IT management was taken care of by the CIO. There has been a change

in expectation as digitisation has brought in new self-service capabilities, new ways of interaction and new ways of expressing our dissatisfaction as customers.” As a result, purchasing responsibility for technologies, especially those geared towards customer and digital experience, has become a collaboration between executives and IT departments. They include everything from marketing clouds and automation capabilities to social analytics and event data management platforms. Cameron said that although large-scale enterprise digital transformation is being driven by the C-suite and boardrooms, it has become the role of the marketers to spearhead its execution. As well as driving transformation, Australia’s digitisation process has changed the executive mindset from being one of just simple technology procurement to one centred on achieving broader business outcomes. Australian outdoor media company oOh! CTO, Andy McQuarrie — in taking the stage during EDGE 2019 — observed: “The CIO and CTO roles have changed. We have moved from pure delivery to delivering outcomes. It’s focused on business outcomes as opposed to delivering a technology solution. “My KPIs are now based on the revenue for the group and how value is added to the business. And there’s the whole of business transformation to be taken care of.”

New customer conversation

As the digital revolution creates new lines of business, new job titles have emerged. Sitting alongside the familiar CMO role

“My KPIs are now based on the revenue for the group and how value is added to the business. And there’s the whole of business transformation to be taken care of” Q3 2019 arnnet.com.au

EDGE 2019 CMO

are chief customer officers, chief digital or technology officers and even chief experience officers. For McQuarrie, the name of the role itself is irrelevant given they all align to the goal of creating the most “clean customer experience possible”. “It’s about supporting the chief customer officer in order to make them successful,” he said. “In enduring they are successful; our customers will be successful and so the whole business is focused on it.” A focus on the end-user has also become imperative for senior marketers, as increased competition requires companies to deliver a strong experience intertwined with brand identity. “With every aspect of interaction with your company, that experience becomes part of the brand and marketers are increasingly responsible for ensuring that it’s seamless, fantastic and meets or surpasses expectations,” Cameron said. “This is where digital transformation has come in. That is why we are seeing marketers and customer experience functions increasingly becoming important buyers, influencers and collaborators of technology.”

New buying process

A decade ago, conversations with marketers may have been unlikely in the channel. Now marketing technology solutions offer a real and growing opportunity for partners. The channel is no longer a collection of resellers. Not so long ago, managed service providers (MSP) were the ‘next big thing’, now independent software vendors (ISVs), digital agencies and start-ups are all part of the ever-developing ecosystem. According to Cameron, this has spearheaded a new need for tailored services and personalisation within the buying process, with online marketplaces becoming an increasingly utilised method of procurement. “Nobody wants to get an email these days that doesn’t have their first name on it,” she said. “That’s 101 personalisation. They are trying to solve a whole bunch of

Andrew McQuarrie (oOh!)

“Functionally, the CIO will become an all business influencer and facilitator, focusing less on just pure technology, and starting to be a genuine part of the leadership group” business challenges by bringing in that technology. It is just that mindset shift in terms of the buyer for both the CIO and the CMO.” oOh!’s whole-of-business transformation is already underway. The company is building an advertising trading platform to support its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. “In doing so we are adding value by increasing automation with the marketing team to do more customer-facing and less on back-office transactions,” he said. “And there is still that traditional cost-out model to ensure you can divert dollars to do more things that add value. We fundamentally add value by building differentiated technology or buying non-differentiated technology. “Get good solutions that integrate well within the enterprise. How you get data in and out, how you get data in a raw format, how you get back to the data later so you can do proper analytics, are all incredibly important.”

He also tipped the CIO role to further evolve: “Functionally, the CIO will become an all business influencer and facilitator, focusing less on just pure technology, and starting to be a genuine part of the leadership group.” According to Cameron, there is a real opportunity for CMOs to become significant growth agents in their companies. “If the CMOs don’t harness the opportunity to be strategic growth drivers in their business and move away from that concept of the brand, they could get left behind,” she said. “The best ones are strategists and growth drivers, and they are getting onto the C-suite. They understand things from a whole of business perspective. “As a result, all these other roles — chief customer officer, chief growth officer, chief marketing experience officer or chief customer experience officer — will continue to become more important.”

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36 Thought Leader EDGE 2019

THE NEED TO BUILD, TOGETHER As a keen renovator, I’ve spent some time thinking about building. One thing I know is that building is a job which takes more than one person. Every builder knows that partnership is the key to getting the job done. Each person on the job site brings their own expertise and tools. The same goes for the building involved in digital transformation. I see our partnerships as critical in building what we need to serve customers. While it may feel like technology is everywhere — we all have smart devices in our pockets — the reality is, that very few industries are fully automated or digitised. Most things are yet to be fully connected and most data is yet to be collated, curated, analysed and harnessed to drive productivity improvements or to identify new growth opportunities. The pace of change is unrelenting, and the complexity of these technologies is increasing. This means there is a real opportunity to help our customers. I believe that none of us can do it alone. Recently, we’ve seen this reflected in the decisions of some of the largest telco companies in the US, observing how they moved to a channel-centric model in order to leverage growth opportunities. These large, traditional telcos have worked out that they can offer more with channel partners by their side. We’re better together.

Nevash Pillay (Telstra)

5G and IoT

5G and IoT are areas of rapid development. Latency on 5G will be much faster than what we experience on 4G. This opens opportunities in markets where milliseconds count. Industries such as healthcare, transport and mining are set to benefit hugely from these developments. Remote management of trucks at mining sites is an example of this. 5G will also enable a myriad of IoT opportunities and applications such as telematics asset tracking, smart connected buildings and data-driven logistics. These are areas that Telstra is at the forefront of — and they are shaping customer demands. That’s why partnership is an imperative. We have thousands of customers who need to digitise, and we have the network and solution strength to serve them, with the help of our partners. We have a large ecosystem of partners and we want to double down on nurturing our existing partners. We’re also looking to grow our mid-market partner relationships.

“It is clear that we’re entering a period of incredible technological change — driven by developments such as 5G and IoT”

Real partnership brings real results

We recognise that simply recruiting channel partners is one thing but investing in them as building-partners is another. We offer an accreditation program to new and existing partners to learn about our technology and the value proposition that we jointly provide to customers. Telstra Partner Central, which is a single interface where Telstra and partners work together using a Salesforce platform, is helping to create a culture of collaboration. In 2019, we’ve on-boarded over 800 users across 100 partners. It is clear that we’re entering a period of incredible technological change — driven by developments such as 5G and IoT. In order to serve customers well, we need to work together. We’ve seen the benefits of partnership in our ability to deliver flexible, customised solutions to our customers. We benefit from our partner’s expertise; our partners benefit from our experience and capacity. Most of all, customers benefit from this powerful combination. Partnership is the key to offering an end-to-end solution. That is what will drive all of us forward into the future. Nevash Pillay is executive of partner sales

at Telstra

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EDGE 2019 Photos

EDGE 2019 represented the fifth running of the leading channel destination conference across Australia and New Zealand. Centred around Build, more than 300 C-level executives came together in a collaborative and educational environment, through an action-packed conference featuring in-depth local research, compelling business streams and structured networking. CHRISTINE WONG

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38 Thought Leader EDGE 2019

steps to creating a diverse and inclusive company

Far from just being a social good, workplace diversity and inclusion plays a huge part in the performance of employees and business success alike. That’s because when individuals from different backgrounds come together in a supportive environment, they can pool varied talents, skills and experiences to accomplish much more than those who all think and work the same. What are some practical ways to foster a diverse and inclusive organisation? Here are seven key steps:

1. Start with a mindset change Instead of treating diversity and inclusion as a ‘check-box’, redefine it as a strategic priority — one that can generate significant competitive advantages in even the most competitive markets. Business leaders should establish KPIs for diversity and inclusiveness in certain areas, like productivity and innovation, that directly impact the organisation’s bottom line.

Jenni Flinders (VMware)

2. Put a plan in place

It’s not enough to say that diversity and inclusion are important to a company. Organisations need clear, practical plans with specific targets, goals and metrics. But CEOs and board members should take care to ensure that their managers don’t simply hire individuals to ‘fill quota’.

“Listening is one of the best ways to improve trust, employee engagement and collaboration” 3. Set clear criteria during hiring

Have a simplified list of requirements, without being too specific to the point that

it excludes certain groups of people from applying and narrowing the application pool. In all interviews, try to also include at least one interviewer and one candidate from an under-represented group: doing so can negate unconscious bias amongst even the most well-meaning of hiring boards.

4. Hire outside your network

Hiring outside our ‘comfort zones’ — including those with different backgrounds and from outside the industry — can result in fresh ideas and perspectives that will prove invaluable to a business in areas like problem-solving, team building, leadership, project management and adaptability.

5. Spend time developing talent

A lot of time, effort and money are spent in acquiring great talent. But what happens when they decide to leave? Establish succession planning frameworks early on, with a clear plan for training, re-skilling and equal opportunities for progression. That way, key performers from all backgrounds and groups can see themselves growing their career, with full clarity on what they need to do to achieve the next level.

6. Listen to your employees

Listening is one of the best ways to improve trust, employee engagement and collaboration. Good leaders should proactively seek to understand ‘the ground truth’ of day-to-day operations and gain a deep understanding of the employee experience from their point of view.

7. Enforce until normal

To create a culture of diversity and inclusion, top-level leaders need to keep reinforcing habits, practices and guidelines until they become a part of the everyday fabric and DNA of the company. An internal ‘leadership code’ or ‘operating system’ of diversity must exist and be reinforced in dialogue and visible initiatives until it becomes standard operating procedure across recruitment, pay, and talent development. Jenni Flinders is worldwide channel chief at

VMware

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EDGE 2019 Photos

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40 Roundtable Data Protection

CREATING A

DATA-DRIVEN ADVANTAGE IN AUSTRALIA CHRISTINE WONG

THIS EXCLUSIVE ARN ROUNDTABLE — HELD IN BRISBANE IN ASSOCIATION WITH DELL TECHNOLOGIES AND TECH DATA — OUTLINED HOW PARTNERS CAN TAKE ADVANTAGE OF A CHANGING DATA PROTECTION LANDSCAPE — MATTHEW SAINSBURY REPORTS. The average amount of data managed within an organisation has increased from 1.45 petabytes (PB) in 2016 to 9.70PB in 2018, placing new pressures on Australian businesses. Such an explosion of data is creating the need for customers to house a deep understanding of its value, illustrated through recent Global Data Protection Index findings. The research — commissioned by Dell EMC — highlights that 92 per cent of businesses now realise the potential value

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of data, with 36 per cent already executing monetisation strategies. Yet despite this, nearly half (45 per cent) are struggling to find suitable data protection solutions, especially in the case of newer technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Consequently, a gap is emerging in Australia between maximisation and protection, with businesses building out data-driven strategies on wafer-thin security foundations.

According to Andy Jones — sales manager of Aliva — organisations are feeling “unprecedented pressure” to take responsibility in data management. “We’ve got a lot of customers in education and finance,” he explained. “The conversations we have with them have turned sharply to governance. “They are now thinking about what’s being stored, and there is a feeling across the community that these organisations should be focusing more on data protection, because if their data is leaked the impact on the community is huge.” Businesses today aren’t always comfortable executing on data management requirements however, with

Data Protection Roundtable

“Only a very brave CIO is willing to remove data. They don’t want to be the person that admits to signing off to get rid of something valuable”

complexity and confusion existing around the storage of data. “Only a very brave CIO is willing to remove data,” observed Kon Kakanis, director of Sundata. “They don’t want to be the person that admits to signing off to get rid of something valuable. CIOs need to know more about the data they hold, but unfortunately with no classification moving forward no one knows what there is. “Helping organisations categorise their data provides them with a strategic advantage. People are running data lake projects for current data, but that’s still looking forwards, not backwards. You can gain a lot of insights from the historical data, as well. So, the question is how do you draw that value out?” This is even more evident with smaller organisations which, in some cases, lack knowledge on data regulations and the associated risk profiles. “In the sub-50 seat space, there’s still a significant education journey that needs to happen in terms of corporate compliance, risk, breach reporting, continuity and how they handle backups,” added Jonathan Allan, IT sales manager of Secure Access. “They need to learn how to handle data in general. These businesses don’t necessarily have boards, so the conversation to the senior leadership team needs to be slightly different.” In assessing changing customer dynamics, Pia Broadley — director of vendor alliances across Australia and New Zealand at Tech Data — acknowledged the local market is struggling to balance maximising data amid heightened

demands to enhance protection levels. “The big change I’ve seen in recent times is not just about how to protect the data but how to use it,” she explained. “We find that channel partners are constantly asking about how they can build solutions to use data not just store and protect it. “They want to know how the data becomes available in such a way the solution has a commercial benefit to them, and then how they can do that in a way that’s simple, so they don’t need to have a team to train for a month to fully take advantage of it. “That’s happening because the partner’s customers are managing data. There is an appetite out there for customers to find

data management companies and engage them, because they want to understand data better.” Meanwhile, Geoff Hughes — managing director of Venn IT — outlined a process channel partners can use to ensure organisations are understanding of the modern data environment. “Starting with data protection is a cleanliness exercise for an organisation — to be able to ensure it knows it is achieving its recovery points,” Hughes said. “The next step is trying to drive more value out of back-up data. “Customer data used to sit in one data centre, now it sits everywhere. It’s sitting in an Office 365 environment, an Amazon Web Services environment, a Microsoft Azure environment, multiple data centres or through platform or software-as-a-service. “Now, thanks to data back-ups, we can get all that data into one place. Once we’ve re-centralised all of the data, the next question to the organisation should be how do we gain some insights and value out of it? How do we transform the back-up data into a launchpad towards data lakes?”

L-R: Andy Jones; Ian Richards; Geoff Hughes; Andy Bird; Jerry Vochteloo; Pia Broadley; Norm Jeffries; Satish Naidu; Kon Kakanis (bottom row, L-R): Mark Andersen; Nadia Cameron and Jonathan Allen

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42 Roundtable Data Protection

“It’s one thing to deploy a backup solution, but it’s another thing to put aside the time to carry out a full restore test. We all need to encourage our customers to practice good habits” Weighing up data

Despite the ideal of leveraging back-up data strategically, such an approach — on most occasions — could not be further from the mind of Australian customers. Of course, data management, warehousing, back-ups and data loss prevention (DLP) are all important to a modern business, but it’s not necessarily a common customer skillset. “Organisations that practice restoring back-ups and patching are few and far between,” acknowledged Norm Jeffries, managing director of Computer Merchants. “Our job is to encourage them to do it. We’ve all seen the war stories first-hand. It happens to organisations that it shouldn’t, it happens to the biggest in the market. Then you start to wonder how it happens. “It’s because they don’t practice the basic things. It’s one thing to deploy a

Norm Jeffries (Computer Merchants)

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back-up solution, but it’s another thing to put aside the time to carry out a full restore test. We all need to encourage our customers to practice good habits.” The increasing importance of data has also created a need for businesses to understand where information is residing, amid plans to integrate such information into a wider security strategy. “Data sovereignty has become a common issue in the way that it sits and is protected,” said Ian Richards, managing director of IntegrationWorks. “As a partner, we do need to know if the data can go outside of Australia, and, if it can, what are the different data protection rights that come into play.” But given the market landscape in Australia, can the channel rely on the potential impact of regulation to motivate? Today, the potential penalties and risk profile of allowing data to leak, or be lost,

Pia Broadley (Tech Data)

may not be severe enough in Australia, according to Jerry Vochteloo, cloud data protection lead across Asia Pacific and Japan at Dell EMC. Yet as explained by Vochteloo, if overseas trends are a guide, it won’t be long before Australia joins other regions in instituting strict penalties around data misuse. “In Australia the regulations and requisite fines are often pretty light,” he said. “There have been very few prosecutions and businesses ended for being in breach. “But look at what General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] did. Why did people suddenly sit up and take notice? Because the maximum fine is four per cent of a company’s worldwide revenue. All of a sudden there was a fine that could hurt an organisation. “There is a trend to start increasing the fines. For instance, Singapore now also has million-dollar fines, and that helps.” The problem IT departments face isn’t just centred around the scramble to be compliant, however. It is the sudden interest in compliance from corners of the organisation that hadn’t previously looked at it.

Data Protection Roundtable

Jerry Vochteloo (Dell Technologies)

“There was one large chemical company that we recently engaged with where the cloud team is also the IT team. We almost needed to run a back-up 101 course, explaining what a full back-up was and why organisations should have certain retentions.” “Compliance issues hit at a high level and then cascades down to IT, which responds ‘well, that’s great, I’ll add it to my other impossible job list’,” added Kakanis of Sundata. “It can then feel like they’ve got a victim within the organisation.” Computer Merchant’s Jeffries said he had seen this trend in action. “We had one organisation with about $2.5 million to $3 million to do a project to remove Windows XP from all their devices and move to something that was supported,” he explained. “The organisation had been putting it off, but then the regulators got involved,

saying the director was now accountable for the data, so when the organisation identified it had exposure through Windows the mandate came down pretty quickly from the top. “Directors are in fear and when it’s board-driven, it’s often to avoid the risk of fines or jail time. Nobody wants to be in the news for something like that.”

Culture of data

Andrew Bird — regional manager of Queensland at BlueAPACHE — observed that in many cases, the responsibility of data within an organisation lies with the

IT department, despite a clear lack of understanding of the implications of such a move. “Take insurance, for example,” Bird said. “Boards or managing directors will pass a spreadsheet to IT, whether it be internal IT or outsourced IT, and then expect IT to be able to complete it. “Two-thirds of the content in those spreadsheets is about business policies, which means it is not just about IT. The immediate reaction is ‘this is cyber so therefore it’s about IT’, but it’s not — it’s about so much more. It’s about the users.” Many organisations are also looking to

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44 Roundtable Data Protection

“We see a big move to application development, so most of the data we now protect is in the cloud on AWS and Azure, and so on” offload responsibility of data and security to partners. Jeffries said that scrutiny is increasingly being placed over the channel as a result. “It’s important that, as a channel partner, you’re able to point to your own organisation as proof of what you can do,” he said. “Are you up to date with patches? Have you removed administration rights from ex-staff? Security is a big job to do but it is simple. It’s about making sure we follow those fundamental things.” Delving deeper, Kakasis of Sundata stressed that despite more frequent discussions about back-up, internal culture is struggling to keep pace with data changes.

“But patching has done a complete 180-degree turn,” Kakasis said. “Three or four years ago people patched if it was absolutely necessary. Now service-level agreements [SLAs] include the frequency of patching. “It has become part of the environment that people patch on a regular basis and across systems and they are getting better at it.” Much of what is driving these trends is a changing IT skillset and focus within organisations, according to Vochteloo of Dell EMC. Internal IT teams are increasingly focused on managing cloud and DevOps environments, meaning partners are being relied on more heavily for “old school” IT support.

“The people who understand the value of back-ups are disappearing,” Vochteloo said. “I’m increasingly finding I’m going back to the most basic conversations with IT teams around what back-up is and why they should do it. “For example, there was one large chemical company that we recently engaged with where the cloud team is also the IT team. We almost needed to run a back-up 101 course, explaining what a full back-up was and why organisations should have certain retentions.” According to Satish Naidu — CEO of 1ICT — a key trend affecting the entire data industry is the changing view on data. Partners need to not only continue to provide existing data protection services but evolve alongside customer expectations. “What we see is a big move to application development, so most of the data we now protect is in the cloud on AWS and Azure, and so on,” he said. “Traditionally, we needed an on-premise approach to data protection, but customers now use databases as-a-service and an integral part of the software development platform.” The ongoing confusion and organisational challenges around data back-up and regulation is good news for the channel. These businesses require an advanced strategic partner to assist in navigating increasingly high-stakes waters in the market today, and with the shift towards the cloud in many internal IT teams, the need for structured technical support is also all the greater. This ARN Roundtable was in association with Dell Technologies and Tech Data.

Ian Richards (IntegrationWorks) and Kon Kakanis (Sundata)

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Announcing

ARN is proud to announce the 2019 ARN WOMEN IN ICT AWARDS (WIICTA). The ARN Women in ICT Awards (WIICTA), now in its eighth year, provide a program that promotes and recognises the professional achievements of female talent in the tech channel. On November 22, ARN WIICTA will name and celebrate this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recipients of the following awards: RISING STAR SHINING STAR ENTREPRENEUR INNOVATION TECHNICAL COMMUNITY ACHIEVEMENT

Nominations are now open. w w w. a r n n et .c o m . a u /w i i c t a

46 Dicker Data TechX 2019

“The role of distribution is evolving and growing in line with the needs of our vendors and partners”

EMPOWERING THE FUTURE CHANNEL

MORE THAN 3200 PARTNERS CAME TOGETHER FOR DICKER DATA TECHX 2019, OUTLINING THE FUTURE CHANNEL ACROSS BRISBANE, MELBOURNE, PERTH AND SYDNEY. IN OUTLINING THE CREDENTIALS OF MODERN-DAY PARTNERS, KEY VENDORS DOCUMENTED THE STRATEGIC NEXT STEPS TO PROFITABILITY IN AUSTRALIA — JAMES HENDERSON REPORTS. The rise of new technology buyers — consuming emerging solutions and offerings — is not a new concept for an Australian channel well-versed in the art of change. For decades, vendors have flooded the market with new products, instructing partners to pivot in the pursuit of profitability. Yet today, the trigger for change is coming from within the

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ecosystem as a future channel emerges. “The role of distribution is evolving and growing in line with the needs of our vendors and partners,” observed Yasser Elgammal, head of sales and alliances at Dicker Data. “We believe our role is to provide the future channel with the platform to reach their full potential and be as successful as possible. The solutions that we add to that platform are designed

to address the challenges facing our partners and vendors. “For example, end-user demand for OPEX and as-a-service solutions has been growing rapidly and all of the existing solutions in market weren’t tailored to what the channel needed, so we created our own bespoke answer to the challenge and launched Dicker Data Financial Solutions.” As an aggregator of solutions, Elgammal said success in the channel is now defined by an ability to collaborate at a partner-topartner level, with distribution centrally positioned to facilitate such an approach. “We’re now evolving to become an aggregator of partners,” Elgammal added. “We’re trusted by thousands of partners and we know where each ones’ specialisations reside, so in the new world of partner-to-partner collaboration, it’s our role to help facilitate those connections.” Looking ahead, Elgammal cited Windows 7 End of Support in January 2020 as a key opportunity for partners to capitalise on. “This is a major device refresh trigger for every business in Australia that is still running the soon to be unsupported operating system,” he advised. “Now is the time for partners to be positioning a modern device to their end-users for a fixed monthly price. “By moving end-users to a deviceas-a-service solution, we’ll be able to support our partners in two to three years’ time with another device refresh, whereas those partners who do a straight CAPEX device refresh now may struggle to secure future device upgrades from their end-users.”

TechX 2019 Dicker Data

CISCO

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

Kevin Bloch (Cisco)

Shant Soghomonian (Dell Technologies)

The market is changing in Australia with user experience rising in importance for customers. Applications must now work quickly, effectively and securely from anywhere, with businesses also beginning to appreciate the value and importance of data. Customers require a data plan and policy framework which requires partners to be ‘data literate’. The rise of artificial intelligence is also helping customers improve productivity while increasing automation levels and reducing costs, creating another opportunity for partners to skill-up. On the flip side, as businesses become more digitally savvy, they become more vulnerable, placing demands on partners to enhance security and privacy capabilities in response.

“By focusing on one area of expertise, partners have to remain open to collaborating with other vendors and specialists to provide customers with the full service they require to meet their strategic goals”

Kevin Bloch is CTO of Cisco

CITRIX

Brian McColm (Citrix)

“IT has been undergoing transformation for years. We’re spending more time working on cloud and remotely, as well as adopting new as-a-service models. “Customers value an approach that’s focused on the enduser, and the goals of the business beyond the initial sale. Our most successful partners are those capable of operating on the cutting edge and understanding how we can work together to drive the best results for customers. “These partners want to understand how emerging technologies can be adapted to suit any number of different deployments.”

“The way partners and customers interact has changed considerably over the past five years. Research shows that customers are now carrying out more research before they engage a partner. This change in dynamic provides partners with the opportunity to position themselves as trusted and educated experts in their chosen field. “We are seeing more specialist channel partners emerge — gone are the days when channel partners were a one-stop-shop. Now customers are choosing their partner because they are known for their niche solutions. “By focusing on one area of expertise, partners have to remain open to collaborating with other vendors and specialists to provide customers with the full service they require to meet their strategic goals.” Shant Soghomonian is general manager of channel sales

across A/NZ at Dell Technologies

“Our most successful partners are those capable of operating on the cutting edge”

Brian McColm is director of channels across A/NZ at Citrix

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48 Dicker Data TechX 2019

HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

LENOVO

Paul Richardson (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)

Matt Codrington (Lenovo)

“The modern-day channel partner is visionary, versatile and able to partner with various complementary vendors, thus bringing together other partners to build out robust and supported skills and solutions. “These market-leading partners have an eye to the future on how their customers are and will be growing their business, reducing their costs and reducing their risks. Going forward, partners must focus on what they are good at and ascertain how to make this process scalable.” Paul Richardson is national partner sales manager at Hewlett

“There are three key traits which our most successful partners demonstrate. Firstly, an ability to provide innovative services, staying ahead of the competition and continuously thinking about the future while delivering outcomes today. “The second is consistently exceptional customer service. At Lenovo, we prize customer centricity above all else, and partners which share this approach are often the most successful. Finally, a willingness to continuously collaborate with Lenovo is key to mutual success, and something we always look to foster and encourage.” Matt Codrington is managing director of A/NZ at Lenovo

Packard Enterprise

MICROSOFT

Adrian Thake (HP)

Brad Clarke (Microsoft)

“Partners need to have a distinctive understanding of what their strengths are so they can double down in these areas in order to acquire new customers, differentiating themselves from their competitors. “The first step is to talk to current customers and really understand what you are doing for them that they value. Once you understand the verticals or horizontals you have a more unique offering to create a strategy for the targeted customer. Then once well-established, explore parallel markets which may also value what you do.”

“With regards to customer acquisition, new logos are great however at Microsoft we are also focused on helping our customers achieve more by having the best of experiences across our three clouds. “With that in mind, most partners still grow organically through word of mouth with limited marketing. Leading partners have differentiated offerings and use modern marketing techniques whilst co-selling with their preferred vendors.”

Adrian Thake is national commercial channel sales manager of HP

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Brad Clarke is partner management lead at Microsoft

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HAMILT ON ISLAND JULY 28 - July 31, 2019