Crn323 digital

Build safe shops for client downloads

Dell

Change of tack favours channel

Public cloud

AWS secures enterprise trust

Growth leaders

CONNECTING THE AUSTRALIAN CHANNEL

App stores

Expert views on managing expansion, seeking out new clients and finding the salespeople of tomorrow

ISSUE 323 JANUARY 2014 AUD$8.00 inc GST www.crn.com.au

contents

CRN Editorial

Editor Steven Kiernan skiernan@crn.com.au Online Editor William Maher wmaher@crn.com.au Editorial Advisor Andrew Birmingham abirmingham@crn.com.au Editor, iTnews Brett Winterford bwinterford@crn.com.au Art Director David West Contributors Nate Cochrane, Matthew JC Powell, Mathew Dickerson, Leon Gettler, Sholto Macpherson, Robert Faletra, David Hollingworth, John Gillooly Advertising Advertising Manager Rebecca Wallace rwallace@crn.com.au Advertising Manager Matthew Child mchild@crn.com.au Campaign Co-ordinator Ellen de Vries edevries@nextmedia.com.au Subscriptions crn@subscribenow.com.au Published by nextmedia Pty Ltd (under licence from The Channel Company,LLC.) Level 6, Building A, 207 Pacific Highway, St Leonards NSW 2065, (02) 99016100 Locked Bag 5555 St Leonards NSW 1590 Chief Executive Officer David Gardiner Commercial Director Bruce Duncan CRN contains articles published under licence from The Channel Company, LLC Some articles appearing in this publication are reprinted by permission of US Computer Reseller News copyright (c) 2006 The Channel Company, LLC All rights reserved.

This magazine is published by nextmedia Pty Ltd ACN: 128 805 970, Level 6, Building A, 207 Pacific Highway, St Leonards NSW 2065 © 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the prior permission of the publisher. Printed by Webstar Sydney, distributed in Australia by Network Services. The publisher will not accept responsibility or any liability for the correctness of information or opinions expressed in the publication. All material submitted is at the owner’s risk and, while every care will be taken nextmedia does not accept liability for loss or damage.

Privacy Policy We value the integrity of your personal information. If you provide personal information through your participation in any competitions, surveys or offers featured in this issue of Inside Sport, this will be used to provide the products or services that you have requested and to improve the content of our magazines.

Your details may be provided to third parties who assist us in this purpose. In the event of organisations providing prizes or offers to our readers, we may pass your details on to them. From time to time, we may use the information you provide us to inform you of other products, services and events our company has to offer. We may also give your information to other organisations which may use it to inform you about their products, services and events, unless you tell us not to do so. You are welcome to access the information that we hold about you by getting in touch with our privacy officer, who can be contacted at nextmedia, Locked Bag 5555, St Leonards, NSW 1590

Printed on paper sustainably sourced from PEFC certified forests

Please recycle this magazine

26

on the cover

20

Fast50 discussion panels Introducing the salespeople and IT buyers of the future

From the coalface The next generation of tech users are doing it their own way

22

Cloud channel Microsoft might be late to the party but don’t count them out in the cloud

24

Letter from the US Why do vendors insist on treating partners as if they were staff?

64

CRN Tech: The latest reviews from our team in the lab

68

Out & about Avnet’s sci-fi Christmas cruise, Newlease’s Christmas drinks and MYOB assists the Oasis Youth Support Network

70

Accolades In the winners circle: Primavera, AVG Technologies, Distribution Central, Amcom, Aria Technologies

46

Enterprise app stores Clever IT firms help clients defend against download risks

52

Public cloud Big end of town starts looking beyond the fog

56

Interview The hard work has only just begun for Michael Dell

in the mag 6

Threads Oakton grows locally and overseas, Intel drops McAfee name, ACCC slaps Apple, recalls for Netcomm and Chromebook, big deals for BigAir, Smile IT and ac3, UXC wins in US

17

Under the wire Broadcasters are looking for their own iTunes moment

72

18

Business column Managing growth: sometimes success is harder than failure

On the move Movers and shakers across the channel

74

Rabid Reseller New Years resolutions www.crn.com.au January 2014 3

from the editor

the editorial team William Maher Online Editor

Andrew Birmingham Editorial Advisor

Brett Winterford Group Online Editor

Sholto Macpherson Contributing Editor

Robert Faletra US columnist

Steven Burke US columnist

A good day for M&A

I

f 2013 was a bumper year for industry consolidation, 2014 is already shaping up to be more of the same... and then some.

The top end of town remains takeover hungry, especially UXC. Barely a week goes by without the giant publicly listed integrator snapping up one IT firm or another. I have also noticed plenty of action among smaller players.

Earlier this month, I spoke to south-east Queensland-based MSP Smile IT, which has ambitions to dominate the Sunshine Coast region. I was also speaking to Fast50 regular Thinkin’ IT over in Western Australia – they’ve just acquired a one-man band that should help expand their reach south of Perth.

Of course, consolidation is a perennial feature of the vendor community.

The big one in recent weeks was Oracle’s pounce on Responsys for an eyewatering $1.4 billion. With Responsys, Oracle hopes to grab a larger share of the fast-growing marketing services space. Oracle has already bought two complementary firms, Compendium and Eloqua. It’ll face stiff competition from Salesforce.com, which took a $2.5 billion gamble on ExactTarget last June, and Adobe, which bought Neolane earlier this year for $600 million.

Only time will tell who will win in the much-hyped marketing automation sector. One thing is clear: M&A works best when there is a strong overlap of culture, shared expectations and scope to enter new markets.

As a business journo, I’ve spent much of my career covering mergers and acquisitions. So there was a nice symmetry to the announcement late last year that CRN itself had been acquired. Along with our stable mates iTnews and PC & Tech Authority, we have joined nextmedia, one of the largest magazine publishers in Australia.

It has been immediately clear that the buyout fits with the ideals I outlined above: our company cultures match-up; there’s enough crossover of markets to offer synergies while leaving plenty of scope for growth; and our new owners are bullish about the opportunities in channel publishing.

It puts CRN in the strongest possible position to start 2014 and I’m very excited about the prospects ahead. I hope the same is true for your business.

M&A works best when there is a strong overlap of culture, shared expectations and scope to enter new markets

Steven Kiernan, Editor, CRN skiernan@crn.com.au

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from the editor

the editorial team William Maher Online Editor

Andrew Birmingham Editorial Advisor

Brett Winterford Group Online Editor

Sholto Macpherson Contributing Editor

Robert Faletra US columnist

Steven Burke US columnist

A good day for M&A

I

f 2013 was a bumper year for industry consolidation, 2014 is already shaping up to be more of the same... and then some.

The top end of town remains takeover hungry, especially UXC. Barely a week goes by without the giant publicly listed integrator snapping up one IT firm or another. I have also noticed plenty of action among smaller players.

Earlier this month, I spoke to south-east Queensland-based MSP Smile IT, which has ambitions to dominate the Sunshine Coast region. I was also speaking to Fast50 regular Thinkin’ IT over in Western Australia – they’ve just acquired a one-man band that should help expand their reach south of Perth.

Of course, consolidation is a perennial feature of the vendor community.

The big one in recent weeks was Oracle’s pounce on Responsys for an eyewatering $1.4 billion. With Responsys, Oracle hopes to grab a larger share of the fast-growing marketing services space. Oracle has already bought two complementary firms, Compendium and Eloqua. It’ll face stiff competition from Salesforce.com, which took a $2.5 billion gamble on ExactTarget last June, and Adobe, which bought Neolane earlier this year for $600 million.

Only time will tell who will win in the much-hyped marketing automation sector. One thing is clear: M&A works best when there is a strong overlap of culture, shared expectations and scope to enter new markets.

As a business journo, I’ve spent much of my career covering mergers and acquisitions. So there was a nice symmetry to the announcement late last year that CRN itself had been acquired. Along with our stable mates iTnews and PC & Tech Authority, we have joined nextmedia, the fourth-largest magazine publisher in Australia.

It has been immediately clear that the buyout fits with the ideals I outlined above: our company cultures match-up; there’s enough crossover of markets to offer synergies while leaving plenty of scope for growth; and our new owners are bullish about the opportunities in channel publishing.

It puts CRN in the strongest possible position to start 2014 and I’m very excited about the prospects ahead. I hope the same is true for your business.

M&A works best when there is a strong overlap of culture, shared expectations and scope to enter new markets

Steven Kiernan, Editor, CRN skiernan@crn.com.au

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Global and local expansion

When there is

channel conflict, it’s real simple.

All ties break in favour of partners Michael Dell ‘Now comes the hard part’ p34

the big deal

Oakton rolls out Vic Uni portal and grows in India

By Andrew Birmingham

Oakton is kicking goals locally and overseas, with a high-profile Oracle rollout in Victoria and a significant expansion of its development centre in Hyderabad, India.

The publicly listed integrator has implemented Oracle Service Cloud to support of Victoria University’s online student admissions process.

The University has already processed more than 1000 applications since going live with Oakton’s solution on 22 November.

This self-service approach results in faster selection outcomes, which are seen as a key benefit for both the students and administrators, according to Oakton.

“The great thing about being able to apply online is that it makes it easy and stress free for the students,” said Brooke Young,

vice-president, marketing and advancement, Victoria University.

Oracle Service Cloud combines web, social and contact centre experience.

Oakton chief executive Neil Wilson said: “Automating the university application process has made the experience a lot less painful for students and more seamless and efficient for Victoria University.

“With the help of our partner, Oracle, we have implemented a fantastic cross-channel solution that has multiple benefits for every stakeholder,” added Wilson.

Oakton is also expanding is offshore footprint. The company currently has almost 300 overseas staff is set to approach 400.

It employs 284 offshore workers with another 96 open positions.

Automating the university application process has made the experience a lot less painful for students

Neil Wilson, Oakton

Security rebrand

Intel scraps McAfee branding Oracle acquires Responsys for $1.39bn

Oracle will buy web-based marketing software maker Responsys for about US$1.39 billion (A$1.55 billion) to bolster its cloud computing offerings.

The vendor has been focusing on cloud software to fend off competition from nimbler rivals such as Workday and Salesforce.com, which offer web-based tools at prices that often undercut Oracle.

Responsys makes cloud-based software that businesses use to manage their marketing campaigns across email, mobile and the internet.

The deal comes exactly a year after Oracle said it would buy Eloqua, a maker of cloud-based marketing automation software, for US$810 million.

Earlier this year, Salesforce spent US$2.5 billion on marketing software firm ExactTarget.

6 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

Intel is scrapping the McAfee name, three years after it spent $7.7 billion to acquire the security giant.

Keith Buckley, managing director of McAfee Australia & NZ, said: “Yesterday at CES 2014, Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, announced that as new products are introduced, the McAfee name will be phased out and branded Intel Security.

“The shield – which represents the core values of security and protection – will remain. The re-branding will begin immediately, but the transition will take up to a year before it is complete.”

Buckley said McAfee would continue to operate as a wholly owned Intel subsidiary. “Its employees will continue to work side-by-side with Intel employees currently working on security activities under the Intel Security umbrella.”

John McAfee, the flamboyant millionaire who founded the pioneering anti-virus software company, said he was glad that the chipmaker plans to drop his name from its products.

“I’ve been begging them to drop the brand or fix the product,” McAfee said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Last June, McAfee appeared in a profanity-laced video attacking the quality of the software produced by the company, which he founded in the late 1980s. He said he frequently gets emails from customers who complain that it degrades the performance of their computers and is difficult to remove.

Intel has repeatedly said the attacks on the quality of its software are “ludicrous” and without merit.

With Reuters

John McAfee

threads number cruncher Apple distie deal

Conexus bought by global supply chain giant TNS Distribution

By Brett Winterford

Australian mobile peripherals distributor Conexus has been acquired by TNS Distribution, the retail distribution arm of global supply chain giant PCH International.

The acquisition, made for an undisclosed sum, provides TNS access to an Australian retail channel for the range of iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac accessories it distributes in other territories.

“Acquiring Conexus will give TNS clients better access to all major retail customers in the Australian region,” said Ivan Eustace, cofounder of TNS Distribution.

“In turn, we are offering the Australian market a vast array of world-class brands that were not previously available. ” Conexus, which has distributed a wide range of iOS, Android and other mobile accessories and

Acquiring Conexus will give TNS clients better access to all major retail clients in Australia

Ivan Eustace, TNS Distribution

peripherals since 1991, now forms part of the global PCH International group.

PCH is headquartered in Ireland but operates out of China. It began as an accessories importer in the US but has since grown into a global sourcing empire with over $400 million in annual revenues.

“This acquisition is an exciting addition for the PCH Group,” said PCH International founder and chief executive Liam Casey.

“It will allow us to expand our global retail distribution services to our clients, which include some of the world’s largest brands and innovative hardware startups. It is one step closer for them to get their products to market.”

A spokesman for PCH confirmed that Conexus’ founders Mark Daley and David Murray will be employed by the acquirers, “along with other current Conexus staff”.

Aussie flash milestone

25

Years that Australia has been connected to the internet p20

<10

Average margins for Amazon Web Services resellers in Australia p22

1884

Foundation of the National Cash Register (NCR), which established the world first sales training school p26

80c

Some experts forecast that 80c in the dollar of IT spending now comes from outside the IT department p34

25%

Percentage of enterprises that will have their own app store by 2017, according to Gartner p46

$660m

Value of the CIA’s cloud contract, won by Amazon Web Services after a bitter fight with IBM p52

Harbour IT will migrate Tigerair onto flash storage in its private cloud. The deal arose after Harbour beat rival bidders Brennan IT and Blue Apache in a tender for the airline’s managed services. The work came up for grabs after Virgin acquired 60 percent of Singapore-based Tigerair in July; the airline was rebranded Tigerair Australia. Harbour IT is currently migrating one of the airline’s applications to its cloud, which is hosted in the Equinix data centre in Sydney, with disaster recovery n Melbourne. It marks one of the most high-profile Australian companies to switch to flash storage. Harbour IT was one of the first Australian resellers of Pure Storage.

48

Age of Michael Dell; he founded his eponymous company in his mid-twenties p56

www.crn.com.au January 2014 7

threads tenders in progress Portfolio, Program, Project and Contract Management (3PCM) ICT Solution and Implementation Partner Department of Transport and Main Roads Department of Transport and Main Roads invites tender responses from suitably qualified service providers for the provision of Portfolio, Program, Project and Contract Management (3PCM) ICT solution and implementation partner.

Peter Hurkett tmr8713@tmr.qld.gov.au (07) 3066 8579 20/02/2014 Provision of Video Surveillance Equipment and Services Australian Customs and Border Protection Service The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) is seeking to establish a panel of service providers for the provision of video surveillance equipment and services. A full description of services can be found in Section 2 of the Request for Tender.

Contact Officer cctvoperationsadmin@customs.gov.au 19/02/2014 Corporate Website Design Department of Mines and Petroleum The Department of Mines and Petroleum (DMP) is the State’s lead agency in attracting private investment in resources exploration and development through the provision of geoscientific information on minerals and energy resources.

Achievement of this role is, to a large extent, facilitated online via the DMP’s website. tricia.ketting@dmp.wa.gov.au (08) 9222 3585 4/02/2014

Blow to Microsoft

Chromebook reseller’s NSW education coup

By Steven Kiernan

Reseller PCS Australia has landed a major deal as the exclusive supplier of Chromebooks to the Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta.

The contract opens up around 80 schools to the reseller, which is run by industry personality Syd Borg and based in the Sydney suburb of Granville.

The deal means PCSA can supply the diocese with two models of Chromebooks, from Acer and Samsung.

Borg estimated the deal was worth up to $2 million per year and could cover anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 Chromebooks per annum, along with Google Apps.

He told CRN that the move to Chromebooks could have “major implications on Microsoft”.

“Due to low costs, the Google Chromebook with Google Apps is becoming a very economical product compared with Microsoft,” said Borg.

“The [Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta] is migrating everything over to Google.

The Chrome­ book with Google Apps is becoming a very economical product compared with Microsoft

Syd Borg, PCSA

That means email, the students’ documents and all the work they are doing, including social media, will be on the Google cloud.”

Borg added that Google was “over the moon” about the deal.

“It has taken the best part of 10 months to put this together.

It has been a long, long process of evaluation.

“One of the clear features was battery life. They wanted products that could operate all day without needing to be plugged into the power point,” he added.

Borg said both the Acer and Samsung devices offered eight to 10 hours of battery life.

PCSA’s relationship with the Parramatta diocese goes back almost 20 years; the reseller started supplying schools with NEC equipment in 1994, Borg said.

He added that the diocese also has device deals in place for Apple and Lenovo products.

The Catholic Diocese of Parramatta spans 78 Catholic schools with a total of more than 43,000 students.

Apple account win

Business Intelligence Services Endeavour Energy Endeavour Energy invites tender responses from suitably qualified service providers for the provision of business intelligence services.

Contact Officer tenders@endeavourenergy.com.au 31/01/2014 www.tenderbytes.com.au Details provided by TenderBytes, Australia’s technology tender notification and tender-writing service.

8 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

Melbourne-based managed services provider Technetics Consulting has been awarded a multi-year contract with the Australian College of Optometry, beating out 85 bidders to land the new client. Technetics will devote five staff members to the integration stage of the account, which should be worth up to $250,000 over the next couple of years. The Australian College of Optometry is “heavily an Apple house”, including laptops, desktops and servers, said Technetics managing director Zoran Tasevski.

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shaping tomorrow with you

threads Apple’s consumer rights deceptions

Wireless worries

Two-year warranties now standard after ACCC slap

Shocks lead to NetComm recall

By Allie Coyne

Apple Australia was reprimanded by the competition watchdog for misleading customers around rights for product refunds or repairs.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) investigated Apple’s behaviour around consumer rights and found it had made a number of false and deceptive representations to some customers about whether they were entitled to a refund, replacement or repair.

It found Apple had told the customers it did not need to provide any recompense, despite such remedies being covered by consumer guarantees in Australian Consumer Law. The products ranged from iPods to iMacs, peripherals, iTunes and App Store software, and non-Apple items such as headphones and printers.

The ACCC said Apple staff had been wrongly communicating Apple’s 14-day return policy and 12-month manufacturer’s warranty.

The watchdog also said staff had

been denying customers assistance for faulty non-Apple products – purchased from Apple – and had been redirecting customers to the manufacturer of those products.

Apple has since given the ACCC an undertaking that it will implement new compliance measures, including extending its 12-month warranty to 24 months – equal to provisions in the Australian Consumer Law. “This undertaking serves as an important reminder to businesses that while voluntary or express warranties can provide services in addition to the consumer guarantee rights of the [Australian Consumer Law], they cannot replace or remove those ACL guarantee rights,” said ACCC chairman Rod Sims.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has issued recall notices for two NetComm wireless products due to electric shock fears.

NetComm’s NP204 and NP504 adaptors, which plug into a power point to “transform your existing electrical wiring into a highperformance online network”, suffer from a “deformed” connection to the earth pin prong.

“In some circumstances, the fault could result in electric shock,” according to the ACCC notice.

NetComm chief executive David Stewart told CRN it was a “preventative recall”.

“There’s a quantity of units that may have some faults with them.

The maximum number is 2,329 pairs. The good news is there hasn’t been a reported incident.”

Stewart said NetComm was reaching out to customers by placing advertisements in select newspapers throughout Australia and New Zealand.

NetComm’s NP504 and NP204 are current generation products and have been offered by a number of retailers.

145,000 devices pulled

Safety fears drive Chromebook recall Google and Hewlett-Packard have recalled 145,000 power supply/ chargers for the HP Chromebook 11 in the wake of nine reports of the chargers “overheating and melting during use.”

“There is one report of a small burn to a consumer and one report of minor property damage to a pillow from an overheating charger,” according to a recall report from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which lists Google as the “importer” of the product and HP as the “distributor.”

The US CPSC, which listed the “hazard” as a charger that “can overheat and melt, posing fire and burn hazards,” said consumers 10 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

“should immediately stop using the recalled charger” and contact Google for a free replacement.

The offending charger has a sixfoot-long cord with a micro USB connector (Model no: MU15-N1052A00S) and was made in China.

Google and HP had already stopped selling the HP Chromebook 11 on 13 November after reports surfaced of the overheating chargers.

JB Hi-Fi was the only retail chain in Australia stocking the notebook.

A JB Hi-Fi store spokesperson confirmed the product was “recalled” from stores following its withdrawal from US chains.

A recall notice from the Australian Competition and Consumer

Commission (ACCC) said the notebook’s charger was faulty and was at risk of overheating, melting and potentially catching fire.

“The risk is potential dermal injury and damage to materials from contact with an overheated charger. There may also be a potential fire risk, although no fire has been reported.”

Local Google and HP representatives declined to comment.

threads Five years ago this month Telstra takes aim at NBN winner Telstra claims $1-$2 billion in annual revenues may be at risk after its exclusion from the NBN process but that it is already in a “good competitive position” to take on the successful bidder.

Speaking at a Citigroup conference in the US, Telstra chief Sol Trujillo ends weeks of speculation over the cost of the telco’s sudden exclusion from the project.

“We’ve had some people talk about the fact that we might lose $4 billion of profits [or] 40 percent of our profits. Rational analysis would suggest that at most, a mid-single digit percentage of revenues or perhaps $1 to $2 billion may be at risk, and that is over an extended period of time because it takes time to build all this.”

Trujillo reiterates Telstra’s concerns over a rival consortium being awarded the contract, including whether or not they had secured appropriate financial backing and what he calls “unresolved technical issues”.

He also waters down potential revenue opportunities from the NBN if it is built from rural areas out to the cities. The implication is that Telstra’s own losses from being excluded may be offset by the economics of the build methodology employed by a rival consortium.

“Rural wireline services are not intrinsically profitable,” says Trujillo.

Trujillo concedes that “there is a risk we might see some slight market share erosion” in rural areas from the NBN, but said “no one is going to take 100 percent of the market share”.

Reseller sheds carrier business

BigAir spends $6.5m on Anittel’s hosting arm

By Steven Kiernan

Anittel has agreed to sell its network infrastructure and carrier business to BigAir Group for $6.5 million.

The sale follows a strategic review

by PricewaterhouseCoopers and is expected to complete on 31 January 2014, subject to conditions.

Anittel told the ASX: “Aside from the sig nificant cash injection and subsequent balance sheet improve­ ment, the sale of these elements of the overall Anittel portfolio of businesses, will enable the company to focus its business around its rapidly expanding hosted collab­ oration services (HCS) business alongside its well­established IT services and cloud business.

“This enhanced focus will enable greater investment in skills around technologies that are in increasing demand by Australian businesses.”

Anittel will continue to resell its former voice and data services through a channel partnership agreed with BigAir. On the flipside, BigAir will be able to sell Anittel’s HCS offerings via the BigAir distribution network.

Anittel managing director Peter Kazacos said: “Clients will enjoy enhanced benefits both via Anittel’s

No reprieve for Data#3 till second half Data#3 has forecast weak trading due to “soft and uncertain” conditions. In a trading update to the ASX, the country’s biggest reseller said stalled IT decisions meant trading was not expected to pick up until the second half of 2014.

Chairman Richard Anderson said: “It’s very disappointing that, with continued delays in decision-making associated with IT capital expenditure, the business now appears unlikely to achieve its first half budget.”

Data#3 has budgeted two-thirds of its revenue to come in H2.

12 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

greater focus and ability to invest, and by its ongoing servicing capability via the arrangement with BigAir. Staff who transfer to BigAir will have enhanced career prospects as will the balance of staff retained in the HCS and IT services focused Anittel,” he added.

“This is a transaction that fundamentally recognises and takes into account market trends and the benefits of scale and focus.”

The carrier arm, Anittel Commu­ nications, is expected to regenerate $11­$12 million of revenue and should add more than $2 million in annualised earnings to BigAir. BigAir chief executive Jason Ashton said: “This acquisition enables BigAir to both broaden and strengthen its communications service offerings in the corporate market, and adds to our existing fixed wireless, unified commu­ nications and community broadband offerings. The strength of BigAir’s balance sheet and cashflows has allowed BigAir to fully debt fund this acquisition.”

Two­time CRN Fast50 winner Anittel reported a full­year loss of $7.3 million on revenue of $50.9 million for the 2012­13 financial year.

Clients will enjoy enhanced benefits via Anittel’s greater focus and ability to invest

Peter Kazacos, Anittel

Bloodletting for BlackBerry

$4.4 billion BlackBerry recorded a third-quarter loss of US$4.4 billion (A$4.9 billion) in its first quarterly report following a management shakeup.

threads UXC timeline 1998

MITS and TechComm Group merge to form USC

2000

USC sells MITS for $90m. Broadens strategy to include e-business solutions

2002

USC buys DVT Holdings; the merged company is renamed UXC

2003

Boosts data networking capability with acquisition of Lanlink

2004

Doubles down on data networking with C4 Systems purchase and expands project management with Powerplan

2005

Dives into ERP market with acquisition of SAP consultancy Oxygen

2006

Acquires JD Edwards firm Jigsaw Services

2010

Appoints Cris Nicolli as managing director

2012

UXC Oxygen acquires SAP consultancy Steam; Red Rock acquires Tripoint Online

North American M&A play

UXC expands US reach

By Steven Kiernan

UXC Eclipse’s North American business has staked its claim as one of the region’s largest Dynamics resellers through the acquisition of Tectura for an undisclosed sum.

The deal extends Australianowned UXC Eclipse’s footprint in the US market and sees its global team grow by 180 staff to reach nearly 600 people and a base of close to 2,700 customers.

Tectura also has an Australia division, headquartered in North Sydney, which is not part of the deal.

Cris Nicolli, managing director of UXC Eclipse’s parent company, UXC Limited, the goal is to be “the leading Gold Microsoft Dynamics partner worldwide”.

According to a statement, “UXC Eclipse is a recognised winner of over 22 Microsoft awards in the past seven years – most recently 2013 Microsoft Dynamics ERP Partner of the Year in Australia finalist and 2013 Microsoft Dynamics Reseller of the Year Canada.”

UXC’s Cris Nicolli

Queensland expansion

Dubai investor for Smile IT

By Steven Kiernan

Smile IT is gearing up for aggressive growth in south-east Queensland with a new investor, the opening of its second office and its first acquisition on the cards.

The managed service provider, which is based in Carindale, Brisbane, was founded in 2007 by Datacom veteran Peter Drummond.

Late last year, Smile IT was buoyed thanks to a buy-in from Ralph Steven-Jennings.

Steven-Jennings is relocating to the Sunshine Coast from Dubai, where he has a 25 percent stake in IT-Serve, one of the biggest MSPs in the region.

“Ralph has bought a half share in the business,” Drummond told CRN. “Our plan is to expand Australia wide.”

The investment is already paying off with a new office opened in

Our plan is to expand Australia wide

Peter Drummond, Smile IT (left, with Steven-Jennings)

Pelican Waters in the Sunshine Coast. Smile IT expects to follow this with an acquisition of another local IT company later this month.

Drummond said he hoped that to learn from the experience of his new partner. “Ralph’s company started the same size as us, five or six people, and now they have 50 techs plus administration staff.”

The pair plan to aggressively grow Smile IT. “If we don’t double the business, we aren’t doing our job very well,” said Steven-Jennings.

Microsoft gave its seal of approval to the buyout.

“As a leading partner in the Asia Pacific region with proven success in driving and growing its Microsoft Dynamics practice in the Americas, UXC Eclipse has a well-earned reputation for providing the highest level of support and innovation,” said Neil Holloway, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions Sales and Operations.

“Customers can be assured that when they work with UXC Eclipse, they are dealing with one of our top Microsoft Dynamics partners in terms of customer retention and satisfaction.”

The deal also marks the second acquisition in two months for publicly listed, Melbourneheadquartered UXC Limited.

In October, SAP practice UXC Oxygen acquired Melbournebased e-commerce specialist White Labelled, whose clients include Harvey Norman, Bookworld, Bevilles and Jeanswest.

ac3 acquisition

Reseller buys NSW agency The NSW government has sold its state-owned services provider, the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communication (ac3), to systems integrator Klikon Solutions for an undisclosed sum.

The government has been looking for a buyer since May 2013, when it revealed plans to offload the agency.

The sale also forms part of the NSW government’s strategy to move away from being a provider of IT services to a purchaser, as outlined in its ICT Strategy for 2012.

At present, ac3 provides support, systems and network management, infrastructure and platform services, application services, and mobility management to several NSW government agencies. Around 80 percent of ac3’s $15 million in revenue last year came from NSW government clients. www.crn.com.au January 2014 13

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THREAT OF THE MONTH

Head into 2014 with a strong security stance

H

ave you made a New Year’s business resolution for 2014?

If not, this should be the year for you and your business to become proactive about cyber security and make smarter, more informed security decisions. With the threat landscape always changing, the delicate balance of enabling your business to run productively while keeping it secure requires you to think seriously about security this year.

The following four recommendations from McAfee are a great place to start when assessing your business’ security practices in the New Year: Set the foundations – conduct a risk assessment and look to reduce the potential attack surface It’s often hard to determine how at risk your business is, and this can be a daunting task given the array of devices on the network and the continual bombardment of security warnings you receive. Why not spend January conducting a risk assessment?

This should consist of assessing who is connected to your system, what devices and programs are they using and what can they access. With human error and unauthorised access just as dangerous to businesses as outside attacks, it is worth starting the year with a holistic view of your cyber security strengths and weaknesses.

Once this has been done, it will be beneficial to map how certain types of incident or attack may affect the most critical elements of your business and try to minimise the possible ‘attack surface’. For example, do you have old business computers lying around that are no longer in day-to-day use, Example of an opportunistic attack A keylogger is a malicious program that records every key stroke made by the user of a computer. It is downloaded to the computer without the users’ knowledge and use to gain knowledge of sensitive information such as system passwords. It is important that businesses are aware of opportunistic attacks, such as a keylogger attack, when considering security solutions.

but still give access to sensitive data?

Identifying and eliminating these types of vulnerabilities will minimise the impact of a potential attack.

Work out your priorities and implement sustainable security With so many avenues for cyber criminals to penetrate business networks, businesses need to take a proactive approach to cyber security and understand how much damage a potential attack is going to do, and what the most valuable assets are to protect. That means that any investment towards greater cyber security in 2014 security needs to go beyond anti-virus and be sustained approach rather than ‘set and forget’.

McAfee wants you to be able to sustain a healthy, effective level of security all year round, without spending too much time away from growing your business. Get started with simple steps such as knowing which devices are connected to your network, ensuring proper data protection is in place through a virtual private network and firewall, and place limits on who has access to sensitive company data.

Ensure that security is everybody’s responsibility While BOYD and cloud storage are becoming the norm in businesses, there is a lack of knowledge about what company data is walking out the door with employees. At the same time many staff are unaware of the security risks that come with using web-based productivity services and storing personal data on work devices.

Services such as Dropbox and Google Docs are being embraced by employees for business purposes, and can boost productivity, but for many businesses the problem lies in defining the line between usage for business and personal use. Usage of cloud storage can be beneficial for the company if the right controls are in place, such as allowing downloads while blocking uploads that ensure confidential data stays within the

organisation.

It pays to be open with your staff – invite them to share the programs and devices that they find most useful in the work environment, assess the risks that these will potentially bring and set rules. If everyone in the company understands the importance of cyber security, then the opportunity for attack is dramatically reduced.

Be aware of the range of attacks targeting SMBs All sizes of business are vulnerable to a range of threats, including both targeted and opportunistic attacks, so it makes sense to understand the various threats, and the potential damage these can cause.

An opportunistic attack aims to exploit random victims by bombarding potentially thousands of computers with malware hoping to find some form of weakness in their security defence. Opportunistic attacks are rife as criminals make full use of advances in cloud computing, mobility and social media.

Opportunistic attacks often take the form of drive-by downloads and spam which load keylogger programs and malware on computers via malicious email links and social media, enabling criminals to collect vital company data.

On the other hand, a targeted attack is one in which the victim was chosen specifically based on certain criteria, and only then does the cyber criminal identify the weaknesses that exist within that business. Recently there have been examples of exploitation of “watering holes” as the first entry point into a business. Criminals plant malware on a topical website visited by employees, such as a business partner’s web training page or a mobile developer forum and are able to gain access to the computer who visits the site.

For more info go to http://www.mcafee. com/au/small-business/smb-securitysolutions.aspx www.crn.com.au January 2014 15

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under the wire

threads

Matthew JC Powell

TV can either catch up or lose out As more and more viewers take control of what programs they watch and how, it is high time broadcasters seek out their own iTunes moment. The alternative is bleak

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few months ago, I wrote in this space of the moral dilemma I had confronted when Channel 9 and, by extension, iTunes had failed to provide the final episode of a season of a TV show I like. Faced with no legal or even quasi-legal avenue to obtain the episode, I resorted to piracy via BitTorrent.

On the off chance you’re interested, the episode did eventually show up on the Australian iTunes Store – months later. I don’t know if or when it aired on Channel 9, because I have stopped watching Channel 9. As I promised, I did pay for the episode when it was finally possible to do so.

I mention that so I can mention this: my attitude to piracy has changed pretty radically, at least as far as TV is concerned. Not because I’ve been converted to the joys of peer-to-peer file sharing (I haven’t) but because I’ve come to understand just how wrong the TV business model is.

You see, with the shift in my viewing habits away from scheduled programming and towards á la carte iTunes selection, I decided it was time

to trim down my Foxtel package. If I’m watching less of it, I should pay less, right?

Tell that to Foxtel. According to Foxtel, if I want to watch anything at all, it is ‘Essential’ that I subscribe to a home shopping channel, a Christian programming channel (I was not asked what religion I adhere to at any stage, but recent Census data says quite a few Australians consider Christianity an optional extra), a racing channel, something about Eurosports, something about Japan, a country music channel and more that – to be perfectly frank – I do not consider essential. Can I pay a bit less and not get some of these? Nope – they’re ‘Essential’.

Define ‘essential’

The really amazing part was when I realised that almost none of the channels I regularly watch on Foxtel are in the ‘Essential’ package.

Almost everything I actually want is in one or other of the additional packages, which as it happens also include numerous bits and bobs I don’t want.

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order

Is any other industry so dependent on making people pay for stuff they don’t want?

Is there another industry so dependent on making people pay for stuff they don’t want? Offhand I can’t think of one. The music industry used to be like that – you’d buy a CD for $20 even though it only contained two songs that could be listened to without lasting damage to your ears and soul – but iTunes changed it.

Well, more accurately, Napster and Kazaa changed it, then iTunes swept in and found a way for people to get only the stuff they want while the people who made it still got paid.

The big losers were people who were counting on making a decent living out of one good song and a CD full of pap. Even now when I see ‘Album Only’ next to a track I have grave misgivings about the rest of the album.

Steve Jobs reportedly told his biographer that he had “cracked” the puzzle of revolutionising the TV industry much as he had the music business. I fear that he had not. The TV industry is too addicted to money for nothing (I don’t want my MTV, but I’m buying it anyway – it’s ‘Essential’).

Jobs had the stature to do what he did to the music industry because, as the head of Apple, he had credibility with tech people and, as the head of Pixar, he had credibility with creatives. He could talk to both in language they understood. With him gone, I don’t see anyone who can convince television producers and distributors that their business model needs to change, and show them how.

Which leaves BitTorrent and its – if you will excuse the pun – peers. The TV industry is stealing from us, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to disagree with people who want to steal back.

I can’t, of course – I make a living from intellectual property, so for me piracy is hypocritical. But someone needs to make the TV industry change its ways, and if it must be brought to its knees first, so be it. www.crn.com.au January 2014 17

threads

business column

Leon Gettler

Growing without blowing it The kind of stellar growth seen among the Fast50 is not without its risks

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esellers facing rapid growth have a unique set of management challenges. The first and most obvious is managing cash flow. This is particularly important for rapid-growth companies. People on the outside assume that a high-growth firm has lots of cash but when growth is the agenda, these firms must constantly reinvest in their businesses to fuel that growth. This means it is more likely that these businesses will operate in a perpetual cash crunch.

Managers in these sorts of enterprises should be flexible and right on top of the life cycle of products and equipment. They might, for example, consider leasing equipment to reduce the firm’s cash outlay and generate tax deductions.

Or they could sell the equipment and lease it back, using the proceeds to pay down debt while maximising the tax position.

Some high-growth companies negotiate evergreen clauses in contracts stipulating when the supplier will replace outdated equipment with the latest technology. This keeps a lid on the resources required to maintain equipment. It also ensures that the most up-to-date state-of-the-art equipment and software will always be available. This could also allow the reseller to enter partnerships, creating important supplier contacts and making room for more access to innovations.

The partnerships can be pivotal in high-growth companies. Regular communication between the partners is essential so the systems and information flows should be able to interface smoothly. Many alliances have fallen apart because of system incompatibilities which were looked.

Managing the flow of information requires an integrated approach so that the systems in an organisation must be able to communicate with the systems in the partner firms.

They could also look at selling non-core or surplus assets. While

18 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

Leon Gettler is a senior business journalist who writes for a range of newspapers and journals

this decreases the size of the business, it can result in a reduction in turnover that could actually have a positive impact on cash flow provided it’s managed properly.

Fast-growing companies also know how to target high-growth market segments. They could learn from new customers and identify which products or services they might require to deliver exceptional value to address unmet needs.

They should also look at focusing on marquee clients, the ones who pay decent fees worth thousands of dollars. These are the clients who are always trying to find ways to improve their business, who have a positive mind-set and are glass half-full types who have the ability to refer the reseller to other businesses. Resellers should develop close communications with these sorts of clients.

The company’s board needs to be stacked with experts. Boards that are top-heavy with investors, lawyers and accountants tend to struggle in the long term and are not that flexible when the unpredictable

happens. Boards of high-growth companies should be balanced with customers, alliance partners and, a CEO who has led a growth company through the ups and downs of the economic cycles.

The fundamental key for high growth firms, however, is getting the buy-in from the talent. This requires an open environment so that the firm can obtain employee input on decisions.

Good engagement programs see firms positioning themselves as outfits that people want to work for. They also provide opportunities for employee involvement, they listen to employees’ concerns and act on them and they bring employees together.

The best companies make sure everyone knows they are there for the long haul. These companies should encourage employees to speak up and focus on customer satisfaction. That gives everyone a common goal. They should also invest in people and work processes and provide top performers with extra incentives.

business column

threads

Outware Mobile

Upward mobility This leading app development house has a roadmap to manage rapid expansion

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or Danny Gorog, founder of app development house Outware Mobile, the key to managing growth lies in his company’s culture. Outware, which hit growth of 201 percent thanks in part to the surge in Android and Samsung, was ranked third in the CRN Fast 50.

The company, which is expected to generate revenues of between $8-10 million this year, employs 63 people. That’s double the number who were working there last year.

Gorog says the company has a “start-up” feel – with regular breakfasts, lots of fresh fruit, talks on technology and design, catered lunches – and he intends to keep it that way as the company grows.

He doesn’t want to lose it.

“That’s our hope and vision,’’ Gorog says. “We have built this culture and I can see that continuing. As we get bigger, you do need more structure to manage a larger team but I think it’s going to be a very different place to working in a bank.”

He says the way to manage growth is to ensure a strong culture is in place.

“We put a lot of time and effort into building a great culture,’’ he says. “We have a really strict interview process so the people we hire are A-class people and they tend to want to work with A-class people so we have built this team of A-class players.

“We have 40 developers. We have three interviews they go through and we have a standard set of questions we ask and tasks we give them that let us assess their capability. We also have an induction process we put together that lets us show them how to do the mobile stuff.”

“With that many people, you can’t build the team and be effective unless you have really good systems and processes. So from early on we decided that was the approach we

From early on, we spent a lot of time documenting our systems and revising them and improving them

Danny Gorog, Outware Mobile

would take and we spent a lot of time documenting our systems and revising them and improving them.

There’s a way we initiate a project, there’s a way we run a project, there’s a way we close the project, there’s a way we do delivery and there’s a way we do testing. And they’re all documented, everyone knows them and they have been built over time through collaboration as a team.

“From a cultural perspective, we get our team involved in recruiting so it’s not just the directors that interview people and bring them on. It’s a very collaborative process.”

Top-class clients

It’s not just A-class employees.

Gorog says Outware focuses on working A-class clients such as the AFL, Telstra, Sportsbet, ANZ and NIB Health Insurance. These sorts of clients have a completely different perspective and appreciate Outware’s work around developing great software and customer interface, he says.

“The nice thing is they typically have a longer-term vision than people with smaller budgets. They say strategically my business will be all

mobile based in five years’ time so we need to have a strong mobile presence,’’ he says.

“They have the budgets and the maturity. They know how software gets built so building mobile software for them is just another branch. They often have internal project management teams and internal IT departments that we interact with and collaborate with tightly.”

The other key to managing growth is the prudent control of cash flow.

“We’re pretty conservative with our cash,’’ he says. “We have a cash flow that tries to look out three to six months and sometimes goes out as far as we can to see what our income is going to be, then we have a look at what the pipeline looks like.

“We use a tool that lets us use probabilities on winning jobs. And we put that into a cash flow so we will see that we need cash for the month to do that much work.

“Being conservative and prudent has been pretty wise because you can get crunched pretty quickly.

We try to maintain between three and six months’ of cash requirements in the bank.”

www.crn.com.au January 2014 19

threads

From the coal face

Mathew Dickerson

Winning the hearts and minds of the channel-agnostic From in-store shopping one day to showrooming the next, under-30s do things their own way. The rest of us can either work out how to do business with them – or miss out

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egular readers of my column will know that I spurn the concept of creating a list of resolutions for the New Year, with statistics revealing that 92 percent of people will be unsuccessful with their resolution. I also believe that business change should be continual and gradual rather than a binary experience.

On the other hand, the holiday season in Australia gives you an opportunity to sit back and watch the cricket and take some time to think.

While watching Australia take to the Poms in the Ashes, I started thinking about the ages of some of the Test cricketers. George Bailey, the 436th Test cricketer to represent Australia, has been described as an old and experienced player who has a mature approach to life and shows great maturity. He has served a long apprenticeship before making his Test debut this season.

If you heard the descriptions, you would think he was in his fifties.

He is 31.

I then started thinking about our society and what the modern consumer looks like. As I said, cricket is a great sport for thinking...

Two technology dates are significant in shaping our modern society. At 10.42am on 23 February 1987, the then Minister for Communications, Michael Duffy, made the first official mobile phone call in this country. On 23 June 1989, the University of Melbourne connected to the University of Hawaii via a 2400bps satellite connection giving the first internet connection in this country.

That will mean that this year, Australia will celebrate 25 years of internet connectivity and 27 years of mobile phones.

Let’s assume we don’t remember a lot before the age of five: that means that all of those people in our society 20 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

aged 30 or below have only ever known a world where we have had the mobiles and the internet.

Granted, mobiles and the internet were not ubiquitous in the mid to late-80s, but you see my point. If you draw a line in the sand at age 31, you effectively have a group who have grown up in a new world.

It is crucial that we understand how to do business with this group.

Selfies and showrooming

The Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year for 2013 was ‘selfie’ but one notable fi nalist was ‘showrooming’: the act of looking at products in a physical showroom, such as a bricks-and-mortar store, then buying online.

A related word that didn’t quite make the fi nalist list – but is my early tip for Word of Year for 2014 – is ‘webrooming’: the act of researching online but then purchasing from a physical store.

While only 2 percent of people say they regularly showroom, 86 percent of people say they regularly webroom. I don’t have the data to support this, but I would argue that the percentage in the sub-31-

Mathew Dickerson is a technology professional who has started a total of six small businesses

year-old category would be closer to 100 percent. That group have incredible trust in the information they find on the internet.

My children, all of whom are under 17, have never opened a physical encyclopaedia for school assignments because they have such intrinsic trust in the information they glean from the internet. Most people over 30 are a little circumspect with internet ‘facts’.

All of this means that you need to learn how to deal with the group under the age of 31. Some 89 percent of this group believes that the best thing a business can do to improve the shopping experience it to better integrate in-store, online and mobile shopping experiences. They don’t see a difference among different shopping methods – it is all just shopping. They just want to shop in the method most convenient to them.

So forget about New Year’s resolutions. Focus some energy on this group of sub-31-year-olds. Your business future depends on it.

threads

cloud channel

Fashionably late The cloud party has been a slow-starter, so don’t count out tardy entrant Microsoft

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ongratulations to last year’s CRN Fast50. It takes a lot of hard work to crack that group of fast-growing IT companies. But one group of channel players is conspicuously absent. Where are the pure-play cloud resellers?

There’s only one in the list that is immediately identifiable to me as a leader in selling cloud software: Paradyne, a specialist in Office 365 that was Microsoft Australia Public Cloud Partner of the Year (SMB).

That there was only one clear SaaS player in the top 50 – not to mention that it had revenue under $1 million – points to two facts about selling cloud software.

The first is that resellers are changing their business models slowly. Many are introducing cloud software as an extension to their hardware portfolio and continuing to sell a mix of on-premise and cloud solutions. It’s a safer road than throwing all your weight into cloud-only services whose low up-front margins can undermine cashflow based on transactional hardware sales.

The second is that selling cloud software is a long play. The days of making a big margin on a complex server sale are fading.

CIOs are less inclined to write big cheques if they can find a paymonthly cloud service.

Instead it’s all about building up trailing commissions on a pile of apps to feather your nest for several years after.

Despite the demand for cloud software of all stripes, the distribution channel for cloud software is clearly still immature.

The commission structures, reseller programs and general encouragement of partners in cloud are all far less developed than in the hardware Sholto Macpherson is and software business. a journalist who covers As a result, the number of resellers emerging technology doing well in cloud software is still in cloud software and highly limited. services

Share before profits

Many of the leading lights in cloud software development – even those with multibillion-dollar valuations – are not turning a profit yet, instead prioritising market share.

Salesforce.com, Xero, Amazon Web Services are well-known names that have signed up millions of customers while delivering losses to shareholders.

But this strategy lays bare the hardest truth: if the most successful cloud software vendors are going for growth but aren’t rolling out more attractive reseller programs, the channel can’t be as important as it once was for reaching every business. The direct reach of the internet has weakened the need for a third-party salesforce.

This realisation dovetails with the commoditisation of technology.

These days businesses just don’t want you to install a system and keep it working, which is essentially the motto of any break-fix IT play.

Instead, businesses want you to show them how to use the

technology in their business to either make more money or cut their expenses. That’s a whole different ball game and one that calls for the customer to pay for the value you bring in consulting advice rather than pay for the product itself.

This is easier said than done. The problem with pairing consulting with cloud software sales is that the consulting fees will look enormous by comparison. If you walk in the door and offer all the services included in Microsoft’s Office 365 enterprise plans for $30 an employee a month, the $10,000 you need to charge for change management, training and workflow design will quickly become a sticking point.

But resellers just need to get better at the consulting game. In my mind, it’s a problem of marketing your services in the right light, which comes down to language. If you can convince business owners that the information you will give them will boost their profits well beyond the price paid then they should have no problem going ahead. In other words, prove the ROI.

Not all clouds are alike

If there’s one lesson from 2013, it’s that not all clouds are alike.

Software-as-a-service – or cloud software – is a tougher space than infrastructure-as-a-service. Several companies in the CRN Fast50 advertise private cloud or hybrid cloud services, including secondand fourth-placed Katana1 and Cloud Plus.

Installation on a pay-per-month One reseller has come up with a clever scheme for selling cloud implementations that solves the conundrum posed above – ie, how to sell consulting services alongside cheap-as-chips cloud software. Microsoft Office 365 reseller HubOne has amortised its professional services accompanying its Office 365 sales over nine to 12 months using financial services company Quick Fee. Yes, others have done something similar, but the new spin is that Quick Fee is used by the accounting firms that HubOne targets.

Most accountants are already familiar with the model and the Quick Fee brand. HubOne sells Office 365 Enterprise 3 licence with InTune and Modern Practice Portal (a SharePoint Online template designed for accounting firms) for $198 per user per month in the first year, and $91 per user per month in the following.

And sales, says HubOne CTO Nick Beaugeard, are rolling in.

22 January 2013 www.crn.com.au

cloud channel

No matter that we’re transitioning from hardware and software to services, the channel adage still rings true: pick your partner wisely. Microsoft, a cloud laggard, could now be emerging as a key player for resellers in the IaaS game.

I was once debating with a software company CEO the merits of going for market share at the sake of profitability. Cloud accounting software startup Xero had rocketed to a $2 billion evaluation in just seven years but it has never turned a profit and is unlikely to for some time.

Is this the model for all software vendors? After all, if you get to a monopoly position like Microsoft then you’re in a position to print money. The software CEO said to me: “Microsoft is not a software company. It’s a hedge fund with a tech company strapped to the front of it.”

Well, Microsoft’s famously deep pockets have allowed it to take its time getting to the cloud and yet still not be late for the party. Office 365 is picking up steam as the market softens up to the concept of cloud and shrugs off data sovereignty. The partnership with Telstra has no doubt helped change quite a few minds in SME land.

But the hot tip for 2014 is Microsoft Azure. Microsoft’s infrastructureand platform-as-a-service is quietly improving its performance to match AWS but its biggest attraction has nothing to do with technology.

Microsoft is finally working out its channel strategy for IaaS. Resellers stand to do very well out of it. A solid channel strategy could assist Redmond in dragging away customers from AWS, which has had tearaway growth since it opened up its Sydney data centres in November last year. According to a story broken by CRN, AWS

Microsoft, a cloud laggard, could now be emerging as a key player for resellers in the IaaS game

threads

reported $25 million in sales in its first full year results lodged with the Australian Securities & Investment Commission.

The thing Amazon won’t tell you is that its margins for partners are under 10 percent. With Microsoft there appear to be more shades of grey. Depending on how you play the game and how much risk you’re willing to bear, margins can rocket up to an eye-watering 50 percent.

Yes, 50 percent. Of course, you need to promise to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of services that year to get them, but for those resellers prepared to back themselves, they could be on a major money-spinner.

Are those sizes of margins sustainable? Probably not. But the reseller game has always been about finding the most lucrative opportunities at any point in time. For Microsoft Azure, that time could be now. www.crn.com.au January 2013 23

threads

letter from the US

Robert Faletra

Vendors don’t score high enough on field engagement A test of any vendor’s channel strategy is whether they treat partners as the free agents they are – or if they wrongly expect resellers to report to them

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here are very few issues that are a universal problem across the channel. Generally there always seems to be some vendors that have figured an issue out while others struggle with fixing the problem.

But there is one issue that the more I dive into it, the more I realise no vendor would get more than a passable grade, and most flat-out would fail the test. I’m talking about field engagement and what happens where the rubber meets the road.

The big issue is that vendors push their channel account managers to do exactly what they shouldn’t be doing: manage the partners. By managing, I mean treating them as though they report to them, and it’s their job to report back what they have in the pipeline, what they expect to close before quarter’s end and other meaningless details that clearly help the vendor but do nothing to advance the ball in the market.

I don’t believe this is the fault of the field-level players. The blame belongs much higher up in the channel management food chain and most squarely on the head of sales, who often is someone that has both the direct and indirect sales execs reporting to him or her.

No easy answers

There are many reasons why this happens, and none of them are a complicated fix. That doesn’t make it easy, however, and that’s why it’s such a mess out there. I believe there are two guiding principles in understanding how to fix field engagement. First, everyone has an agenda. People may say they don’t, but they do. The sooner you know what that is, the sooner you can see if there is alignment on agendas. Then business gets easy.

24 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

Robert Faletra is CEO of The Channel Company, publisher of CRN US

Second, people act in their own self interest. When this self interest aligns with their company’s interest the first principle and this go hand in hand.

Trouble is, they don’t always align.

For instance, a vendor may want a salesperson to push certain products, but the salesperson may want to sell something else because it is easier or carries a larger commission. In that case, the salesperson’s agenda wins over the vendor’s. There are ways to manage this, but it’s not easy.

Solution providers need engagement with channel account managers who are focused on helping partners go to market together. This, of course, is driven by partners’ compensation plans and general channel sales management techniques, which, in turn, are devised at high levels of any organisation. This most often does not align with, nor help, in building and executing a plan to go to market with the partners in the field.

When I talk to solution providers and ask about field-level engagement, the feedback is generally more along the lines of things that need to improve, and it’s really more of a pipeline visibility discussion than driving new business.

Fixing this issue takes determination and a focus that needs to start at the top of any organisation. While I wouldn’t give any vendor an ‘A’ in building a field-level structure that promotes the perfect field engagement, there are some that are making progress here.

One vendor that I believe is making real progress is Hewlett-Packard.

Meg Whitman’s focus on the channel is driving changes that are making their way to the field. It’s still early on, and we will talk more about the importance of field engagement in future columns, but there is hope here. The formula for success isn’t all that complicated, but it does require commitment.

Discussion panel

Introducing the salesperson of the future This brave new world of consumption economics, cloud solutions and the consumerisation of IT demands gun sales reps with a whole new bag of tricks

CRN editor Steven Kiernan hosted a panel of leading vendors and distributors to understand how sales is evolving to meet the needs of today’s IT landscape. From commission structures for cloud sales to the ever-present issue of clients going direct to the vendor, the discussion touched on many of the channel’s most timely – and at times thorny – trends.

CRN Let’s start broad: what will the salesperson of the future look like?

Bruce Rasmussen, Carpe Diem: It amazes everyone in my organisation that we really don’t understand 26 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

the way buyers buy. The way most of us sell dates right back to the foundation of NCR. Our sales process was born in 1884 and not many of us have changed. But buyers have completely changed how they buy, even over the past three years. The sales organisations we see that are winning are the ones that ‘get’ that.

Lawrence Gatica, Huawei: We have come to a place where that trusted advisor has moved from one individual to multiple key stakeholders within a business.

The challenge for any salesperson is to make sure they’re across all of those.

Peter Hewett, Westcon: I think the key skillset in the salesperson of the future is to always be in discovery.

Ask more questions. That’s been true for a long time, and I don’t think it will change in the future.

Steve Jones, SAN Systems: The sales guy of the future is going to be the guy that can position technology in a creative and innovative way and differentiate himself from the competition.

Nick Lennon, Mimecast: The salesperson of the future is the challenger, the person who can bring ideas and talk about the business drivers and the business

Discussion panel reasons for an organisation making a decision. So someone who has that knowledge, who can be the educator, the trusted advisor.

Jason Rylands, DPSA: The salesperson of the future should go in with the intent of helping a customer with problems: actually solving problems as opposed to just trying to flog whatever widget is the latest and greatest.

Daniel Campbell, Fujitsu: If you’re sitting in a customer meeting and they are nodding and agreeing with everything you’re saying, I think you’ve lost the battle. You need the moment when they go ‘wow’ – that is what brings an order.

CRN: Bruce, what do you see when you do sales and marketing training for IT firms?

Bruce Rasmussen: We hear a lot about solving customer problems and I think there’s a role for that, but the salespeople that are going to succeed in this century are moving passed it. Sales has evolved.

When I read a news story in CRN that says, ‘We just won this big deal and beat off 11 people’, it amazes me that the other 11 people even bothered to enter into the competition. Clearly whoever won wrote the tender for the customer and already knew they were going to win.

Buyers start off calm. They don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘My goodness I’m going to convert my entire infrastructure to the cloud today.’ The thing we call a sales trigger moves the customer PANEL Bruce Rasmussen, Carpe Diem David Elliott, Avaya Lawrence Gatica, Huawei Peter Hewett, Westcon Steve Jones, Distribution Central Nick Lennon, Mimecast Warren Nolan, NewLease Angela Logan-Bell, Express Data Jason Rylands, DPSA Daniel Campbell, Fujitsu MODERATOR: Steven Kiernan

from this state of calm into realising that they’ve lost their status quo. They don’t feel good, something has happened, maybe they’ve merged with another company, maybe one of the vendors has changed their licensing structures.

Research shows that on average, the buyer gets 70 percent of the way through their journey before they reach out to folk such as resellers.

The relationship-builder salesperson is the poorest performing of all types of salespeople. If a customer needs a relationship, they should go and buy a dog. The salesperson that can go in with some unique insights, such as research they’ve done in their customer base, they’re the ones that are going to have the most effect on their customer.

CRN How can the salesperson get further up the chain or get involved earlier into decision-making?

Angela Logan-Bell: Bruce gave the example of a tender submission where there is really no hope of winning. Hopefully there are not many resellers who spend their time responding to tenders if they don’t have a relationship with that customer. I would suggest that if you are challenging the customer beyond their existing understanding, maybe they won’t go to tender.

You’ve suggested they don’t necessarily know everything, that there’s a particular technology they haven’t considered that would revolutionise the way they go about things. In that case, it’s very hard for other competitors to leap into that conversation.

CRN How can vendors and disties help resellers with all of this?

Daniel Campbell: Vendors and distributors tend to have quite substantial resources behind them: marketing collateral, marketing funding, pre-sales resources. The key to getting access to those is to build closer relationships with your vendors and your distributors.

Some of the most successful partners we’re working with have proactively come to me and given me a business plan and maybe made a couple of purchases and then asked for some money.

Our end users are becoming smarter about the technology. You’re dealing with IT guys who are going, ‘Look just give us the box and we’ll work it out’.

Lawrence Gatica, Huawei

Steve Jones: It’s quite clear buyers aren’t making decisions based on brand anymore. A couple of years ago, you would have had major vendors that had one alliance partner and now they’ve got two or three alliance partners managing multiple alliances with multiple vendors. Vendors have a lot of certifications and we’ll get guys into our office beforehand, do some training so that when they actually go and do their vendor certifications – which generally cost money – they’re guaranteed that they’re going to pass.

CRN There seems to be sometimes a disconnect between how vendors sell and what customers are asking for. How can that be bridged?

Peter Hewett: I agree there’s a disconnect. I think it’s an enormous challenge. Marketing can go and get a website built in about 25 minutes.

They don’t need to come to IT anymore. They will buy it from a service provider monthly and if they don’t like it after four months, they can turn it off.

How do we exist in that world?

Especially if the ultimate technology from the vendor is still sold by a guy who has to hit a quarterly u www.crn.com.au January 2014 27

Discussion panel One of the things we find difficult is resellers preparedness to be open with us. You need to have a trusted relationship with your distributors. If you don’t sell it, they don’t sell it.

Warren Nolan, Newlease

people never get paid until it’s ultimately sold to a customer.

number for a three-year licence?

That is a challenge, but it also represents an opportunity for new vendors. A new vendor that comes to market with a subscription-only business is going to be really interesting for small partners.

As a distributor, we can help when the vendor can only sell a one-year, two-year or three-year licence, but the customer wants to pay monthly.

We have a role as a financier.

Distributors are a big bank.

Some of our smarter partners are going to finance companies and using finance more than ever to provide a solution. They’re being quite innovative. They have to because the vendor can’t really solve the problem.

David Elliott: From a vendor’s point of view, we need to change our compensation models for our own people. It’s really important when we’re talking to a cloud provider – be that a distributor, service provider, systems integrator or reseller – that we don’t pay our sales people on the capex sales into that partner. We treat it like a distributor and only pay our salespeople on the sale out.

Otherwise, we end up in a situation where we’ve actually sold the product to, say, our service provider partner, everyone is clapping and everyone is happy, but someone has actually go and sell it to the real customer. So we treat it like a distribution sale where our 28 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

CRN Once customers switch to an annuities-based deal, it’s potentially a lot easier for those customers to switch providers. How can salespeople and channel partners keep those customers when it is so much easier to make a switch?

Warren Nolan, Newlease: The obvious answer is they need to ensure they continue to deliver on the promise. Sometimes it’s not as simple as providing the value; the value needs to be seen to be provided. The salespeople need to ensure that there is a continued connection between service providers and their clients.

Peter Hewett: One of my partners has built a very large managed services practice. In the early stages of this, they discovered that their customers loved the idea of not paying for a day’s professional services to fix a problem with some PCs, but instead pay monthly per PC. Things worked so well that [the customer] kind of lost sight of the value of [the service].

So the next year, when they went back to the customer, they said that for every managed service contract, you get two days on-site from us, included in the price. That allows

If you are challenging the customer beyond their understanding, maybe they won’t go to tender. In that case, it’s very hard for other competitors to leap into that conversation.

Angela Logan-Bell, Express Data

them to be in there demonstrating their value and also gives them an opportunity to be in front of the customer discovering new problems in their business.

It was a very cunning way to get in front of the customer and show them where the problems are in their business. I thought that was a nice, neat way to solve that problem.

Bruce Rasmussen: What we’re really talking is customer loyalty.

How do you maintain customer loyalty in an environment where the switching costs are virtually zero? If you look at the statistics behind what drives customer loyalty, the smallest contributor is brand – sorry marketers. The second smallest contributor is quality of service. The third smallest is value.

So all of the time we think we get defeated because it’s too expensive, that’s just rubbish.

More than 50 percent of the contribution to customer loyalty occurs from the sales experience.

The role for sales is not just winning the deal; how we sell determines how long customers stay with us.

Did we challenge them? Did we educate them on new outcomes?

Did we point out to them in advance

Discussion panel If a customer needs a relationship, they should go and buy a dog. The salesperson that can go in with some unique insights, they’re the ones that will have the most effect.

Bruce Rasmussen, Carpe Diem

where the roadblocks would be?

Are we easy to deal with?

Time-poor executives will deal companies and organisations that are quick and easy to deal with.

Selling is not just negotiating and putting together the deal. You’re not just arguing about the upfront margin; you’re arguing about customer loyalty in an environment where they can switch instantly.

CRN Regardless of whether a vendor is trying to sell direct, increasingly end users want to have a direct relationship with the vendor. Where does the reseller fit into this world?

Jason Rylands: It’s definitely something we’re seeing. A customer will call our vendors directly. It comes down to relationships and it comes down to trust. A reseller may ask us for quotes on equipment.

We’ll try to help them and ask who the end user is. A lot of times there’s a trust issue and they won’t tell us who the end user is.

They’re afraid you will either farm that to another partner or that information will get out in the marketplace and they will lose their competitive edge.

[End users] are sometimes trying to subvert the channel, thinking they will get better information or better pricing if they engage directly with the vendor. It’s so easy today to find that information and to engage with the vendor directly.

If a reseller is part of that vendor’s channel partner program – they’re engaging with the channel account

managers and they have a relationship with that customer – they’ve got a much better chance of that vendor pushing it back down through the distribution channel onto the reseller.

It’s all about openness and trust and intent. [We need to] get that back again. Engage with your channel managers and try and stop that secretive stuff that used to go on. We’re finding partners that are doing that with us are much more successful.

Lawrence Gatica: Something I’ve noticed more and more is that our end users are becoming smarter about the technology. You’re almost dealing with IT guys that are sitting there going, ‘Look just give us the box and we’ll work it out’.

What they don’t take into account is the iceberg affect in terms of the value that the channel brings through integration. These guys who are exceptionally well skilled will grab this box and try and run with it, but the reality is that the value comes from the channel. As vendors, it’s incumbent on us to enable our partners to demonstrate that value.

Peter Hewett: First of all, in terms of trusting end user details to the vendor and distributor, my experience is it is completely safe. It’s very rare there’s a problem with that.

The reason is [deal] registration. It is really important that we keep that data sacrosanct so your deal registration is protected. We are unbelievably careful with that information. I can’t point to a problem in the past two years at Westcon. If you can point one out, I’m all ears, but I don’t know of one.

The second thing is about wanting to have a direct relationship with the vendor. I think that’s true to a certain extent. The customer is far

more educated, but there’s only so much education you can get from a website. The truth is for most of our reseller community in Australia, the customers we’re talking to are small businesses. They’re never going to have a relationship with HP, they’re never ever going to meet anybody from HP. They’re too small and you [resellers] have enormous value in being the resident expert and the person that’s reachable.

The size of sale into the small business into Australia can’t afford direct touch from the vendor. It has to be done with a decent amount of data on a website and then your [resellers’] expertise.

They can buy a server and a rack and some storage, but without your expertise as channel partners to make all that work or to advise the customer how to migrate part of that to the web or to help them to manage a security problem, that stuff really does nothing for them.

Even in a cloud world, we as distributors are soul searching because if everyone ends up putting their servers in a data centre, I am not going to shift many Cisco UCS servers, am I? There’s an enormous opportunity for the reseller community to consult in that environment.

[Cloud] migration is hard. Actually it’s not always the right answer.

Yes, the customer wants a direct relationship with the vendor [but] they’re not always going to get one.

It just isn’t cost-effective for the vendor so they need us, they need the channel to do that and that will always be the case.

Steve Jones: It’s always going to be a contentious point: direct or

u

www.crn.com.au January 2014 29

Discussion panel indirect. That is a reality of the world we’re working in. Generally you understand what accounts are managed direct. I think the big thing here is the fact that the channel actually provides more than just product.

[End users] may want to have a direct relationship, but they’re actually going to be looking at three or four products they actually need in that solution. Having a direct relationship for that particular part of the product is great, but are they going to have a direct relationship with every single vendor on every single part of the solution?

We’ve got vendors who bring leads and opportunities to us for products that complement our portfolio and they go out to the channel because it’s this total bundled solution.

Yes, a big government department wants to deal directly with a vendor, that’s fine. [But] they are still going to rely on the services component to come from the channel.

Warren Nolan: In regard to clients wanting a direct relationship with the vendor, there’s also an opportunity to create something we’ve touched on: how to create loyalty in these relationships with your client when they can switch off.

If you’ve got multiple products from multiple vendors involved in a solution, and if your client wants a

I would encourage you to work with the vendors of your respective cloud offerings to make sure there is alignment of the sales comp plans before you engage with that vendor David Elliott, Avaya direct relationship with one or some of those vendors and you can understand their motivation in wanting to sell to those clients, then you can align yourself with the vendor selling to the client and the client’s relationship back to the vendor.

All three of you are achieving what you want to achieve. It is what I would call basic fundamentals of selling. You understand who is involved in the relationship and you become the central conduit of that.

CRN We have a question from the audience. Resellers will naturally ask what can a distributor do for me, but is there scope for resellers to say, ‘What can I do for my distributor’ and will that lead to more business?

Warren Nolan: One of the things we sometimes find difficult in dealing with our resellers is their preparedness to be open with us about what they want: what are their sales, what is their business plan, what their pipeline looks like.

We’ve talked about the sales function needing a trusting advisor relationship with you and your clients. You need to have a trusted relationship with your distributors.

Your distributors are providing you with a product or service and engaging with you to get to market.

If you don’t sell it, they don’t sell it, so you need to have a trusted

If you’re sitting in a customer meeting and they are nodding and agreeing with everything you’re saying, I think you’ve lost the battle. You need the moment when they go ‘wow’.

Daniel Campbell, Fujitsu 30 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

advisor relationship with your distributor. You can be open about your business plan, your marketing plan and your sales engagement strategy. They can identify gaps and help you with that when you go to market.

Angela Logan-Bell: I would add that it is a multi-tiered relationship type of scenario. So it’s CEO to CEO, CFO to CFO, IT to IT as well as salesperson. The salespeople are the key conduits for that relationship.

We find it’s really critical that if you open yourselves to our organisation then we can open even more resources to your organisation.

Many vendors share with us that there’s very little crossover between distributors. There might be 20-30 percent crossover. There are very loyal Newlease partners, very loyal Express Data partners and the more loyalty we can generate, the more resources we can give you. I would suggest the more we can develop that multi-tiered relationship within our organisations, the more we can open up more resources and value to your business.

CRN We want to ask about the shift in terms of commissioning and incentivising sales people to sell cloud. What models would you suggest that resellers should be using to sell cloud and consumption-based solutions? u

Discussion panel David Elliott: As a vendor, we have to look a the way we change our comp plan to make sure our salesforce is working directly with [the reseller] all the way through to them actually selling and closing that deal with the customer. I would encourage you to work with the vendors of your respective cloud offerings to make sure there is alignment of the sales comp plans before you engage with that vendor.

They can be completely misaligned and you could find that your vendor is not actually working with you once they’ve actually sold you the kit to build up and build out your cloud offering.

Internally, we’ve moved to a TCV – total contract value – model. Our salespeople are incentivised to work with our partners to sell a two-year or three-year contract and they’re paid on that whereas previously they weren’t. We’ve done quite a bit of change in that model in the way we go to market.

CRN What’s the best kind of sales training and where can resellers get it?

Nick Lennon: As a channel-focused vendor, I think it’s looking at vendors that will also add more value than just the bottom line and there’s a number of vendors that are challenging the salesperson to get more out of each engagement and

A reseller may ask us for quotes on equipment. We’ll try to help them and ask who the end user is. A lot of times there’s a trust issue and they won’t tell us who the end user is. They’re afraid.

Jason Rylands, DPSA drive a facilitator role in managing a sale. As a vendor, that’s a program we’re investing in too, to drive our partners in the right direction so it’s mutually beneficial for both parties.

David Elliott: We recognised that I could have 150-200 people in a room and bore them to death with PowerPoint for an entire day and tell them to go away and do the certification. But at the end of the day, they’re not going to do it.

They’re probably not going to learn a hell of a lot.

We engaged the services of a company called Whiteboard Selling to get 200 people in a room and train them in one day. It gives you a new sales tool that you can take into a customer. How many people have been with a customer where they’ve actually started doing some work on a whiteboard and a customer gets up and starts writing on that whiteboard as well? You’ve got engagement there. It’s a really powerful tool.

We did it with Distribution Central and the feedback that we had from the partners was that it was exceptional training.

Lawrence Gatica: There are two sides to training: the formal side and the real-life engagement. I’ve come to learn that within our business, our success off-shore has always been through channel.

One thing I would strongly

Yes, the customer wants a direct relationship with the vendor but they’re not always going to get one. It just isn’t cost-effective for the vendor, so they need the channel and that will always be the case.

Peter Hewett, Westcon 32 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

suggest is for the resellers leverage the vendors. Get the vendors engaged. No one knows the product better than the vendor but nobody knows how to put it together and make it work and bring value better than the channel. If you can get those two things balanced nicely, add some formal training and support your salespeople on the way through, that’s what is going to take you through the next stages.

Bruce Rasmussen: I am constantly surprised at the amount of customised training that my organisation does to small channel partners that is fully funded by either vendors or distributors. When I look behind that, it is because they built the trust, they sat down and did the business plan, they didn’t decide to mate with every vendor in the world. They didn’t play three disties off on every quote to get that last quarter of a percent.

They said, ‘this is what we want to achieve, here’s how we’re hoping that you could fit into our plans’.

I can’t speak for the disties and vendors, but my observation is that when that is done, all sorts of things happen that are over and above just doing the accreditations that people need. ■

Discussion panel

The changing face of the IT buyer Technology purchasing is no longer the sole domain of the CIO, with marketers and C-level execs now major buyers. Is this trend a challenge or an untapped opportunity?

The decentralisation of IT spending is well-documented. Rather than a single pot of money overseen by the IT department, now technology spending is part of the budgets of a broad sweep of business managers.

The pace with which this change has occurred continues to catch channel players off-guard. To better understand the nature of IT procurement today and how it affects the channel, CRN gathered a panel of vendors and distributors to provide their views.

The wide-ranging discussion spanned everything from getting an ‘in’ with a new division within a client company to building out a services offering to win more share of a customer’s spend.

34 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

CRN It is estimated that 80 cents in the dollar is spent outside the CIO and IT function. Is this what you are seeing?

Mona Lolas, McAfee: The IT decision maker is key but I think in terms of addressing the right engagement, it’s more than just the IT decision maker. You have to look at all parts of the business – so what marketing wants, what the CFO’s department needs and then get a sponsor within that organisation to take you into the CIO’s office.

Kris Hansen, GFI Software: It’s no longer just trying to seek out that [CIO’s] budget or trying to track [the CIO] down and getting him to talk to that. There are different

departments and those departments have their own needs and they’re actually driving their own spends.

Ray Kloss, SAP: The IT buyer of today is actually an industry executive. Even the CIO no longer considers themselves a technologist; they consider themselves a mining executive or a retail executive. We find that the IT buyer of today does not consider themselves an IT buyer, they consider themselves somebody who’s trying to be successful and win in their industry. They know they want to use technology to achieve that, but never really talk about IT. Darren Adams, Avnet: We all use technology at home and we all

Discussion panel PANEL Mona Lolas, McAfee Kris Hansen, GFI Darren Adams, Avnet Andrew Mamonitis, Kaspersky Mark Shannon, Pacific Communications Ray Kloss, SAP John Donovan, VMware Vijay Valayatham, Dell MODERATOR: Nate Cochrane

think we know what we’re buying.

But in terms of how the decision is made, I’m not sure it’s changed too dramatically since I started selling back in the ’80s. The CEO, the board and the CFO are fundamental. Sure, the marketing guy may be able to spend $50k and $100k, but in terms of big purchases, there’s still a process to follow.

There are more people involved in the decision cycle today, but overall to get a big deal approved, you’re still going to get the CEO, the board and the CFO and all the rest of the guys and gals to sign off.

John Donovan, VMware: Three issues are influencing the industry.

What people are buying is changing significantly. How they’re buying it and, I think, fundamentally who’s buying it is changing as well.

I actually disagree with the other people on the panel. I think it’s not the C-level, it’s not the IT manager, it’s all the different stakeholders who are going to be using the technology – they have a profound influence on what gets bought and how it’s get bought.

It’s not just an IT decision anymore; it’s a business decision.

Companies are not buying technology from us anymore: they want to procure solutions from us that solve significant business issues.

Mark Shannon, Pacific Communication: We tend to find the decision makers are no longer just one person, it’s a consultative approach. Sometimes even the system integration or installation company has a major say in it.

CRN So what do customers need, what are they asking for?

Andrew Mamonitis, Kaspersky Lab: There’s probably three categories of customers we see: the customer that’s overwhelmed by the technology and security in general and they will generally look to implement just anything; the other customer who is overwhelmed again and shies away from implementing that type of technology; and the third customer, who embraces the technology. They tend to be more innovative. The key is to get the first two categories of customers into that third category.

Mona Lolas: We need to be more aware of being the educator to the customer. In a recent survey, we found that 50 percent of SMBs aren’t even aware of security risks.

So be a trusted advisor and make them aware of policies that should be put in place for employees.

Ray Kloss That’s one of the channel opportunities. We just finished a big piece of research on SMBs in Australia. They’re increasingly competing with multi-nationals.

This number blew us away: 30 percent of SMBs in Australia see themselves as operating in six or more countries in the next three years. One of their biggest opportunities for our channel partners is that all of these companies want to upgrade their environments to be able to compete.

So, the multi-nationals are coming down, [the SMBs] are going up and they’re headed off-shore. It’s a huge opportunity and the challenge is getting the channel partners up to speed with the technology so they can offer the services.

acquisition was that the IT manager would dictate the terms and conditions of what was being procured, how it was being used, where it was be deployed and the applications been running on it. The proliferation of diverse IT devices – iPads, smartphones, phablets – have changed the landscape.

No longer can the IT commander control this. Now you’ve got a significant number of dispersed stakeholders who are starting to dictate what IT policy looks like.

Compound that with a change in the value proposition that the customers’ are looking for. They’re not just looking for agility and cost constraint, they’re looking to have a better relationship with their own customers. That means that you’re forced to change the discussion from solving an IT problem and think further up the chain to what’s actually causing this IT problem.

CRN We have talked about building up a services organisation. How do you scale that in such a way that it becomes profitable, short of putting more bodies on the ground?

Vijay Valayatham, Dell: First of all, let me suggest every dollar of u hardware has $3, $4, $5 of

Mark Shannon: More often than not there are two channels. The first one would be that the customer has a problem and a need. We find out how to supply and satisfy his problems through a solution. The other path is that we can bring a solution to a customer they don’t know they need right now.

John Donovan We spoke before about there being a much broader range of stakeholders involved in decision making. A good example of this is the BYOD revolution. The traditional approach toward IT

We need to be more aware of being the educator to the customer. In a recent survey, we found that 50 percent of SMBs aren’t even aware of security risks.

Mona Lolas, McAfee www.crn.com.au January 2014 35

Discussion panel Today’s IT buyer doesn’t consider themselves an IT buyer, but somebody who’s trying to be successful in their industry. They want to use technology to achieve that, but never really talk about IT. Ray Kloss, SAP

services and software in terms of the business opportunity out there.

That’s interesting coming from Dell, which is traditionally a hardwarefocused company.

The customer’s buying behaviour has changed; building a consultative or outcome-based sales motion is key. Many of you are already in managed services. I think that will continue to leapfrog ahead of some of the other technology change inflection points in the industry.

One thing that is very clear is that organisations want to focus on their business, not on IT. CRN Darren, are you seeing a blurring in the lines between the traditional holy trinity of distie, reseller and vendor?

Darren Adams, Avnet: Decision making, in terms of how something is approved, hasn’t changed that much. I think all companies have audit policies and GAAP accounting rules.

I agree there are more people involved in that decision: they’re more savvy; they’re more educated.

I know I am experiencing slippage in my pipelines and I know my friends on the panel are experiencing slippage. That’s because of the approval cycle; you still have to get things signed-off.

The channel is in the middle of its greatest change in the 28 years I’ve been in it. That’s been driven by a change in how end users want to consume technology. Cloud is a part of that, but not the only part.

36 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

The lines have blurred between what a supplier does, what a distributor does and what a reseller does and an opportunity for partnering is greater than it’s ever been.

When I was at IBM back in the ’80s, they had an entry-level training program. I was a green skin rep and I got told how to sell in the traditional way with an old typewriter guy. We don’t do that anymore in our industry. The people we’re hiring to sell stuff don’t have the skills to do the selling we need them to do in the new world. My personal opinion is that is a train wreck.

We’re in trouble because we keep recycling the same old guys and gals and not bringing new people in. This new world requires a new selling skill.

Kris Hansen I feel that the nontechnical person, the CEO, for instance, their level of understanding of IT is a lot higher now. They’re usually the people that are going to come to you. You are no longer talking to the IT person first, but you still need their buy-in. Even if you’re using a cloud service that’s not part of their infrastructure, usually you have to integrate with the existing network.

Mona Lolas: From a vendor perspective, we have channel

You are no longer talking to the IT person first, but you still need their buy-in. Even if you’re using a cloud service, usually you have to integrate with the existing network.

Kris Hansen, GFI

account managers and we want them to be used in the right way.

You should definitely be talking to your account manager about the methodology each vendor has to go into their customer accounts to help you take that same message out there. Engage with your vendor’s channel account manager and the tools that are all available to you, look into that. Go on a joint sales call. Sit down and try and nut out exactly what the sales pitch would be and do it jointly. That will help bridge that gap in terms of learning and understanding.

Ray Kloss: Back in the day, you went to work and got to play with the cool technology. Now, when you go home you play with the cool technology. I can tell you within our channel community, here is a way you can just look at yourself: does your company ‘deliver cool’?

Partners who ‘deliver cool’ have more work than they can fulfil.

They’re banking it up. At the same time, our traditional partners who do the traditional stuff are struggling. They don’t have enough work.

We will have a traditional partner go in with the reporting structure and one of these old architecture slides and then you will see another company come in on a mobile u

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Discussion panel device and do a quick demo. They say, ‘I can actually make this connect to your network’, and [the client] will be, like, ‘It’s cool’.

Darren Adams: I agree with that strongly. Apple has made a living out of being cool. A few ‘cool’ companies around town tend to do alright. I’m not sure our traditional sales guys know how to do cool very well. You know we’re recycling the same old guys and gals. The best sales manager in our business was selling Red Bull five years ago.

John Donovan: I don’t think that’s necessarily it. Respectfully, I think you guys are still trying to sell technology, you’re just trying to do it in a different way and that’s got a limited lifespan.

We’ve got to grow up as an industry. We’re not here to flog cool stuff, because that’s just got a limited lifespan. If there’s no cool stuff in six months’ time, what the hell are you going to do?

Ray Kloss: John, one of the solutions I’m talking about that’s ‘cool’ is risk management in the finance industry.

It’s not about sizzle; it’s about actually delivering a business change, which is easy and elegant to deploy, that the people who own the projects are looking for. Let’s be frank, what is the number one reason why IT projects fail? They

Every dollar of hardware has $3, $4 or $5 of services and software in terms of the business opportunity. That’s interesting coming from Dell, which is traditionally a hardware-focused company.

Vijay Valayatham, Dell fail in change management. What gets rolled out is unusable and that is why IT projects usually fail.

So what the executives are looking for when making decisions is projects that their people will adopt.

It’s not sizzle – and sorry if you don’t want to use the word ‘cool’ – what people need to roll out are design solutions that people can rapidly start using and be productive with.

John Donovan: I agree with you there, because what you’re saying with the risk management stuff is that it’s solving an inherent problem. It’s nothing to do with the technology and it’s nothing to do with the device that’s delivered or anything like that. You’re actually getting to the core of understanding your customers’ businesses and getting to the core of how you actually solve a problem and we haven’t really spoken enough about that today.

CRN Let’s change gear. What are some new opportunities to get in front of clients?

Andrew Mamonitis: I think the key is setting yourself apart from your competitors. More and more, you need to be an educator. You need to be able to value add to your customers more than just delivering a solution and a great price.

An example of that would be in our space next year: the changes to the Privacy Act. As a reseller, if you

We keep recycling the same old guys and gals and not bringing new people in. This new world requires a new selling skill.

Darren Adams, Avnet 38 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

walk into a customer and talk about that, you would be seen as a trusted advisor. You would be seen as an expert in the field.

We see a lot of SMBs being very complacent, putting their heads in the sand and basically thinking that they’re not going to be a target.

They’re the most susceptible to targeted attacks. The key is they need to understand what would be the ramifications of shutting down your business for a week? Because that can be the potential scenario.

CRN For the people in the room who have great relationships with the CIO, how can they build a relationship with the other people spending money and get into those other areas of the business?

Ray Kloss: The CIO has the same problem the reseller has. The CIO is increasingly finding it hard to reach the CXOs. If you have the ability to educate the CIO on how to deal with the other lines of business, you can give them best practice for marketing or you can give them best practices for HR or best practices for operations. They’re desperate for that.

If you’re rocking up with, ‘Hey where are you guys going, what can I do to help you?’, you’re just part of the problem. I would encourage you to do it by industry because the industry flavour is so significantly different. But if you can educate the CIO to deal with those people, you’re their best friend. ■

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Gallery Gallery

Happy faces at the Fast50

1

Around 200 guests gathered at the luxurious Westin Hotel in Sydney to celebrate CRN’s fifth annual Fast50.

The 50 fastest-growing resellers in the country were joined by the initiative’s sponsors – vendor and distributors – as well as special guests.

The day and night event included two panel discussions looking at channel business issues, as well as a drinks reception and, of course, the official countdown of the Fast50.

2

3

4

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5 1. Aram Farzad from Dell, with Barry Silic, Sturt MacLennan and Peter Low from The Cavalry 2. Bruce Rasmussen and Melanie McKinney from Carpe Diem with Ilana Stone from Express Data 3. Troy Adams from Betta Computer Services, Wendy Acevedo from Fujitsu and Steve Dawson from ONGC Systems 4. Murray Whitlocke-Jones from VMware and Leo Lynch from IBM 5. Michael Gansel from Olikka, Sarah Richards and Adam Barker from SecureWare with AJ Williams from Mercury IT 6. Jules Rumsey from CloudPlus and Stephen Knights from Commulynx

40 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

Gallery Gallery 7

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9 10

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13 7. Angela Loganâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Bell and David Peach from Express Data, with Melina Musumeci and Adam Boreham from Avaya 8. Luke Halliday from Mercury IT, Eytan Lenko from Outware Mobile and Michael Pascoe from Olikka 9. Broderick Smith from Commulynx with Scott Myles and Paul Gregory from Pacific Communications 10. Wayne Trethowan, Tony Dabbs and Mark Shannon from Pacific Communications 11. Drew Carroll from Westcon Group, with Peter Uher and Paul Hendry from Fujitsu 12. Chloe Fryar, Samantha Morrison, Paul Robinson, Lubna Marker and Mona Lolas, with Rebecca Brown and Aileen Patterson from McAfee 13. Samuel Chandra, Leanne James and Carineh Grigorian from Distribution Central

www.crn.com.au January 2014 41

Gallery Gallery

The team from 2012 winners Leet Geek

SecureWare’s Adam Barker checking out his company’s sixth-place ranking

GFI’s Kris Hansen

42 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

Gallery Gallery Paradyne’s Loryan Strant, Newlease’s Carolyn Agombar and Paradyne’s Ben Granger-Holcombe

The CRN table

PCS Australia’s Syd Borg points out his ranking

Outware Mobile’s Eytan Lenko ready to share news of the app developer’s third-place finish

The Samsung team

Avaya’s David Elliott shares a laugh with McAfee’s Mona Lolas

www.crn.com.au January 2014 43

Gallery Gallery 2 3

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1. CRN editor Steven Kiernan with Jarrod Bloomfield and Brent Valle from NGage 2. Adam Barker from SecureWare 3. Eytan Lenko from Outware Mobile 4. Loryan Strant and Ben Granger-Holcombe from Paradyne 5. Ross Ogilvie and David Tsang from Katana1 6. CRN editor Steven Kiernan with Luke Halliday and AJ Williams from Mercury IT 7. Jules Rumsey from CloudPlus 8. Michael Pascoe and Michael Gansel from Olikka

44 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

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feature enterprise app stores

Approved purchasing Software choice can equal risk, so clever IT firms are helping clients by building hazard-proof app stores

By Nate Cochrane

P

icture this: an Australian organisation where workers only use desktop PCs provided by their employer and don’t supply their own mobile devices and apps to do their jobs.

If this scenario made you think, it is because what was once the norm has become the exception; in just five years, bring your own device (BYOD) and apps have gone from heresy to accepted business practice.

But while BYOD has brought productivity gains, the explosion in choice has also brought pain. The cost of software licences and the threat from insecure systems has blossomed under inefficient BYOD policies. IT has also struggled to understand the needs of the business and to plan appropriately.

One of the biggest traps was the perception that IT just says “no” to reasonable requests, which wedges techies from the business.

One response to this impasse, although perhaps belated, is the increasing interest in enterprise or private app stores. These look and feel much like consumer services such as Apple’s App Store or Google Play, but are geared to business needs. In one place, an employee has the apps and services they need to get their job done without broaching the firewall or falling foul of corporate policy.

Enterprise app stores promise greater flexibility of corporate resources while doing the heavy lifting of curating apps for staff in one neat location. They should also 46 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

help to cut software costs because licence costs are managed, while legal and reputational risks from having unauthorised software in circulation are contained.

Gartner predicts that by 2017, a quarter of enterprises will have their own app store. With mobile device and application management software increasingly including the ability to create an app store out of the box, this is a safe bet. Gartner says enterprise app stores may improve security, tighten control and cut costs. In its February note to clients, Gartner recommended organisations should: • Keep their enterprise app store design simple at first, perhaps reusing functions already found in mobile device and app management software the organisation uses • Deploy an app store as part of an application strategy to encourage a spread of apps • Encourage IT buying managers across the business to work together to negotiate better deals with suppliers • Use a solution that will publish mobile, in-house, web and desktop apps • Provide a forum where workers recommend, curate and share their favourite apps.

The momentum for enterprise app stores kicked up a gear in November 2013 when customer relationship management provider Salesforce.com released its Private

Quite a few CIOs are looking like shifting from Apple iOS back to Windows because they want to run their own internal app store

Andrew Rigney, Brennan IT

AppExchange for web apps and mobile devices, with support for desktop operating systems coming later in 2014.

In the early days of the cloud revolution, Salesforce.com was the vendor most responsible for IT losing control of its software stack, so some might be sceptical.

However, in offering an enterprise app store that takes advantage of Salesforce.com user credentials, the cloud provider is also offering an olive branch to IT to help it wrestle back control and offer apps to the business.

Matt Fairhurst, a Salesforce developer and the co-founder of workforce management software vendor Skedulo, says enterprise app store platform providers are transforming the traditional software distribution ecosystem.

“That gives business the opportunity to say, ‘I want to determine which applications I want my users to have access to’,” Fairhurst says. “Users can come along and say, ‘I want expense and travel management’, so there are interesting models coming along.”

It would be a mistake to think the enterprise app store just recasts the service catalogue or philosophy of

enterprise app stores feature

service-oriented architecture. These earlier attempts to align IT with the business were top-down management approaches that imposed their will, albeit with the latter’s consent. But as Gartner makes clear, and it’s up to resellers to impress on their customers; a successful enterprise app store has a feedback loop where employees discover and champion apps that boost their productivity and are curated into the mix.

From the user’s perspective, an enterprise app store must be at least as good as their consumer competitors, cutting through the noise of too many choices and risks.

Mobility’s next challenge

Enterprise app stores are the evolution of mobile strategies helping organisations to corral apps that grew like topsy through different lines of business, says Brennan IT practice director of

CBA banks on its own app store Commonwealth Bank is about to take the covers off Pi, which seeks to make Australia’s largest bank a technology player with a payments platform of its own. In January, the bank will globally unveil Pi in Germany alongside technology partner Wincor Nixdorf.

At its core, Pi reimagines how shoppers interact with sales staff by replacing the tired till or cash register with a tablet (“Albert”), smartphone (“Leo”) and apps. A thousand developers have registered their interest in Pi, and the partners expect the global launch to swell their ranks.

While organisations can offer their wares through Pi’s public app store, the bank’s general manager of merchant solutions, Andrew Cheesman, says they can also distribute through what CommBank calls “residencies”.

“Each country will have its own app store, then merchants can have their own residency so they will have private apps that only their sites can download,” he says. “They can build apps unique to how they operate and at the same time they can publish those apps to the wider app store.”

Cheesman says the bank will connect channel partners to businesses wanting their own Pi apps. “We’re going to create a large community of businesses that want apps and businesses that want to sell apps, so that will extend beyond the merchant space and then you can see it as a distribution channel.”

business solutions Philip Scott. He says business executives are keen to give workers device and app choice in the hopes it will lift their productivity, but still want to reduce their exposure to risk.

“The big [question] was, ‘how do I do this securely with some level of control that I will do the right thing by the corporation?’” Scott says.

“There are lots of firms that went gone through the first wave of mobility – deploying tablets, smart phones, applications and email to those devices – that had limited success from what were high expectations.

“The next generation of rollout is to get applications and data in the hands of the people who need it.

Organisations are struggling with how to tackle this.”

Scott says organisations are weighing the benefits of their own enterprise app store or cloud-based and managed service against going public with an Apple or Google.

Brennan IT hosts its customers’ enterprise app stores, often managing them with Microsoft tools or Citrix XenApp. Brennan IT senior software consultant Andrew Rigney says organisations are also shifting their www.crn.com.au January 2014 47

feature enterprise app stores

Xero: app store hero Xero has found that an early decision to provide an application programming interface (API) to its cloud accounting system has paid off with a growing band of software developers providing add-ons. These apps, which range from the time accounting found in Workflow Max to point-ofsale solutions such as Vend and Kounta, is what differentiates the platform, says the Kiwi cloud vendor’s Australian managing director, Chris Ridd.

“The API was there from day one, albeit it was in its infancy,” Ridd says. “When I started three years ago, we had an API team and about 25 APIs. The cloud was a great platform but we underestimated its power. It’s a key aspect of our company [now], part of how we position Xero as a platform.”

Xero is forging ahead to grow out its own app store, nearly quadrupling its API team to seven employees in three years and hiring an Australian developer relations manager, Ridd says.

Xero doesn’t view itself as the centre of its users’ and developers’ worlds, he says. “We know a lot of business owners won’t think first and foremost about accounting software – they think line of business,” such as the need for a point-of-sale system.

“They soon discover that Xero is a beautiful plug-in. The business owner doesn’t see accounting as sexy and cool, they think: ‘I’m running a services business’. But early in the journey they think, ‘How does that flow into my accounting?’”

Helping each other Ridd says that while developer partners help Xero attract clients, the growing popularity of the platform among some 80,000 SMEs is fertile ground for developers to gain traction. “We’re helping each other, building that network effect.”

He says successful enterprise app stores conform to fairly traditional norms of how to manage an organisation’s IT. “You need policies that prevent or restrict the ability for an employee to sign up for a particular [outside] application with a credit card – this is why Salesforce.com was so successful, because business owners in sales and marketing could bypass IT. “You have an architecture based on employee roles and single sign-on [to applications and the app store]. Think about security, because different applications have different security models.”

platform allegiance as they search for greater control and ease of app distribution.

“In the past six months, we’ve been working with quite a few IT companies at CIO and development level looking to build line-ofbusiness applications and they are doing that through own app stores,” Rigney says.

“Quite a few CIOs are looking like shifting from Apple iOS back to Windows because they want to run their own internal app store.”

Rigney identifies security and rapid turnaround of app updates as key factors behind business emigrating from the “palaver” of Apple’s public service.

“We’ve had guys with one private app who needed to put it through a private app store to make it manageable. They want manageability, visibility and the ability to run updates in an afternoon. The driver for business is to be instantly reactive to the user’s requirements.”

Moving beyond native mobile apps, organisations are looking to 48 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

roll all their apps into a central store so provisioning is done in one place, says Brennan IT’s Philip Scott.

“A lot of businesses have external SaaS applications hosted separately [such as] payroll, performance management or budgeting. How do you deploy those on to smart phones and mobile devices in an app store that’s controlled?”

Security alert

Frost & Sullivan ICT practice head of research Audrey William says security is top of mind for many businesses making these decisions.

“Platform security is the biggest issue because IT managers have to open up many platforms including Google Android for support,” William says.

In a recent survey, Frost & Sullivan found that 21 percent of Australian organisations with more than 250 workers put their own app store as a priority in the year ahead (see p51). But William cautions these will be in competition with public app

You need policies that prevent an employee signing up for a particular application with a credit card

Chris Ridd, Xero

stores. “Creating the right app store is important – it has to have the consumer look and feel. It can’t be boring and mundane.”

In the security and trust triangle bounded by governance, compliance and risk factors, software licence compliance looms large. Some organisations overcompensate by paying twice for desktop apps – once through human resources when welcoming a new employee and then through IT’s licensing arrangements.

The issue of earning maximum return is further muddied if the employee then seldom uses applications gifted to them, or decides to bring their own, unsanctioned applications into their workflow.

Managing licences

One vendor combating this is Flexera, which aims to make the enterprise app store pay for itself by using it as a licensing and provisioning portal. The vendor’s Asia-Pacific vice-president, Tom Canning, says an enterprise app store must be more than just a “request engine” if software licensing costs are to be managed.

“App stores have to be simple for end users but licensing is complex,” Canning says. “So if you make it easier for end users to request stuff you’re compounding the problem. If it’s not supported by solid, back-end processes, end users will lose faith and you’re back to square one.

“The great thing Apple pulled off was 99c a song. A consolidated licence mechanism won’t happen any time soon nor should it because very rightly there needs to be a breadth of

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The CRN Fast50 couldn't happen without the support of our generous commercial partners. We are proud to partner with these vendors and distributors. We appreciate the support they have shown for the CRN Fast50 and for their continued support of the Australian channel.

The CRN Team

enterprise app stores feature licence models. But what you need to do is create that experience for the end user where they don’t have to bother about it.”

The opportunity for a reseller is to be seen as a trusted advisor who releases funds from overspending on duplicate licences or cuts the risk of non-compliance with software licences. This is especially true in virtualised environments in the data centre, he says.

“We see more resellers moving into providing a managed service to the customer across multiple vendors. If you make it easier to buy, and the customer gets value from the software, they’ll buy more.

It can help increase purchases if the organisation knows they’re getting value and driving down wasted spend,” adds Canning.

Large and small

Clients’ growing use of apps from a range of sources is leading systems integrator Object Consulting to deliver app stores for clients, says national Microsoft practice manager Kevin Francis.

“We already have customers that have corporate app stores – large customers, and are moving from a small number of apps to larger number of apps,” Francis says. “We have one customer with 17 apps... so it’s hitting big customers first and moving down from there.”

Francis says Microsoft’s InTune is especially good at managing disparate platforms.

Enterprise app stores may also have benefits in unexpected areas. Danny Gorog, co-founder of one of Australia’s pre-eminent

Organisations’ top mobility priorities in next 12-18 months Implementing a robust security policy/ solution for mobile devices

28%

Introducing corporate governance and user access policies for employee-owned devices

Implementing telecom expense management (TEM) solutions

50%

42%

22%

Extending BYOD to all employees and departments in the organisation

Building a corporate app store (internal to the organisation) for employees to download approved apps

35% 36% 35%

Supporting a wide range of mobile OS (such as Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile)

Providing or extending IT and helpdesk support for employees using personal devices, travelling and for remote/home workers

50%

28%

33% 39% 34% 34%

9% 21%

9% 9% 9% 9%

50%

Over 250 employees 50-249 employees 1-49 employees 13%

Source: Frost and Sullivan, “2013 Enterprise Mobility Report” of 227 Australian CIOs

mobile app developers, Melbournebased Outware Mobile, says it is usually the business that approaches his company; IT is introduced later.

But using an enterprise app store with social sharing functions, IT can see staff chatter for a certain type of app and approach the business with options.

Engaging a design-oriented developer can also aid adoption of internal apps, which tend to be far more basic in presentation than consumer equivalents.

How to build an enterprise app store IMPACTS

TOP RECOMMENDATIONS

The increasing number of enterprise mobile devices and the adoption of MDM by enterprises will drive demand and adoption of enterprise app stores.

Assess the realistic need for immediate adoption of enterprise app stores. There will be limitations as to what can be supported based on platform vendors.

Enterprise app stores can support a more diverse and competitive automated software process requiring less procurement intervention.

IT sourcing and procurement category managers for mobile device hardware, telecom providers and mobile device software must agree on a procurement strategy.

The long-term success of an enterprise app store hinges on a dramatic increase in the comparative supply of software solutions.

Implement an enterprise app store as a component of an organisation’s application strategy, rather than infrastructure strategy, to ensure an adequate supply of applications.

Source: Gartner, “Enterprise App Stores Can Increase the ROI of the App Portfolio” (February 2013)

“Business pays the most attention on interfaces that are customerfacing; they’re less concerned about interfaces that are internally facing,” Gorog says. “I’m not sure that’s the right approach.”

Gorog says public app stores are also immature, especially for services such as push notifications, updates and provisioning, which could stunt an organisation’s mobile strategy.

Outware Mobile is experienced in HTML5 web apps, as well as those for Android and iOS, but Gorog see great potential for Outware in working on enterprise platforms such as IBM and SAP for automating and mobilising corporate functions.

“There’s an opportunity to add value at the front end, to add apps and provide a high customer experience,” he says.

“If people are investing in apps, my recommendation is always think of customer experience first and that’s not something that software resellers consider.” ■ www.crn.com.au January 2014 51

feature public cloud

Big end of town starts looking beyond the fog Is Amazon’s victory over IBM a sign that enterprises are ready to trust the AWS cloud?

By Kevin McLaughlin

A

few weeks after Amazon Web Services beat IBM for a prized CIA cloud contract worth US$600 million ($655 million), the Seattle-based vendor held its second annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

The timing was fortuitous, coming just after a knock-down, drag-out, eight-month legal battle in which IBM’s legal team tried every tactic in the book to get the government to reopen bidding for the CIA contract after the agency chose AWS. The CIA deal was, in many ways, Amazon’s biggest cloud win since launching Amazon Web Services in 2006. Not only did Amazon prevail over IBM – which for years has been synonymous with big enterprise and government IT deals – but it later emerged that the CIA felt the AWS cloud was technically superior to IBM’s. As enterprise IT wins go, they don’t get much bigger.

The CIA, one of the world’s most secretive organisations, isn’t just putting its data in the AWS public cloud. AWS is building a replica of the AWS cloud that will run inside the CIA’s data centre. This sounds like a private cloud, an area of the market in which AWS previously hasn’t played.

AWS re:Invent had an overriding theme of showing that the Amazon cloud was enterprise-ready, so it would have been a great place for AWS executives to share insight into their plans for tackling additional private cloud opportunities, and getting into the wheelhouse of

52 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

competitors such as Microsoft, VMware and IBM. Instead, conference attendees heard the same message they always hear from AWS executives: that private clouds are unnecessary and overhyped. That the concept is created by old-school enterprise vendors that want to keep customers away from the public cloud because it threatens their traditional revenue streams.

The way AWS sees it, public cloud can handle everything enterprises need, and chief among its many benefits is letting customers slash capital expenditure. “Over time, we think very few companies are going to own their own data centre, and ones that do will have a small footprint,” said Andy Jassy, senior vice president, Amazon Web Services and Amazon Infrastructure, in his keynote.

Exception to the rule

Later, in a press conference, Jassy said the CIA deal does not represent a shift in Amazon’s thinking, but he did leave the door open to more CIA-type deals. “We think the most cost-effective and scalable option for the enterprise is public cloud. But there will be a small number of organisations that want private because they’re unable to use public cloud. If they want to have a conversation about doing something in their data centre, we’re willing to have those conversations.”

Terry Wise, director of business development at AWS, had a similar

take in an interview with CRN US at the conference. “We recognise that large customers may have unique requirements, and we will listen to them. If we feel we can serve those with a great degree of operational excellence, and a low price point... we’ll take a look at it.”

AWS executives have steered clear of calling the CIA deal a private cloud. But in an interview with 60 Minutes that aired 1 December, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed that AWS is indeed building a private cloud for the CIA. “We’re building what’s called a private cloud for them... because they don’t want to be on the public

public cloud feature a ready response to the oft-voiced criticism that its public cloud isn’t secure enough for storing sensitive data. While the CIA won’t actually be using the AWS public cloud, it did choose AWS in part for scalability reasons, and that’s a valuable endorsement for enterprises.

“We won based on technological superiority. If that doesn’t show that we’re enterprise-class, I don’t know [what does],” AWS’s Wise told CRN US in an interview at the event.

Asked about critics who claim Amazon isn’t ready for the enterprise, Wise shrugged. He pointed to enterprise customers such as Samsung, Nokia and Unilever, among others. “They’re using us to run mission-critical apps in the front office and back office.”

Enterprise push

We’re building a private cloud for [the CIA]... because they don’t want to be on the public cloud

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

cloud,” Bezos told CBS News’ anchor Charlie Rose, according to the interview transcript.

With that unambiguous description, Amazon’s cloud plans came into their sharpest focus yet.

Whether or not it’s labelled private cloud, AWS is going after all sorts of enterprise opportunities that blend elements of private clouds and public clouds. And the reasons are simple: enterprises are eager to tap into the economic benefits of public cloud, but it’s going to be some time before they’re willing to give up their on-premise hardware. This hybrid approach is the primary way enterprises are adopting cloud, and

Amazon – never one to ignore a market opportunity – is giving them what they want.

Stealthy enterprise offensive

IBM’s response to losing the CIA cloud deal was to launch a print, online and outdoor advertising campaign extolling the superiority of its cloud over Amazon’s. Jassy couldn’t resist taking a jab at IBM in his AWS re:Invent keynote, saying that “some of the old-guard tech firms are getting a little panicky” at the rapid growth of AWS. The “old-guard” enterprise vendors have good reason to be worried. The CIA deal gives AWS

AWS was going hard after enterprise customers even before the CIA deal. There was a big enterprise sales hiring push earlier this year – in February, Business Insider reported there were 75 open AWS sales positions listed on LinkedIn. As of late November, AWS had five open enterprise account engineer positions listed.

AWS rose to popularity as a way for developers to rent on-demand access to compute and storage resources over the internet, and later as a place for startups to run their IT operations. But developers and startups’ needs are very different from those of enterprises, which demand service-level agreements, attentive support, and data security that meets regulatory compliance mandates.

To establish a foothold in the enterprise data centre, Amazon is getting into private cloud opportunities, according to several sources with knowledge of the matter.

“They are definitely going that route. They see opportunity in the private on-premise business,” one source familiar with AWS’s plans told CRN US. Amazon’s first move into the data centre was the AWS Storage Gateway, a software-based appliance unveiled in January 2012 that connects a company’s private cloud storage with the AWS S3 cloud storage service for file sharing, backup and disaster recovery.

Amazon added gateway-cached storage last November and started www.crn.com.au January 2014 53

feature public cloud positioning AWS Storage Gateway as an alternative to local storage arrays for storing customers’ primary data.

But while the software-based appliance works for smaller organisations, it wasn’t scalable enough for enterprises. AWS is now testing a purpose-built hardwarebased cloud storage appliance that represents the next evolution of the AWS Storage Gateway, sources told CRN US in late November. Amazon isn’t manufacturing the hardware itself, but through a third-party white-box vendor, sources said.

Once installed in a customer’s data centre, the hardware appliance acts as a bridge between an enterprise’s data centre and the AWS cloud. The idea is to let companies store some data in the AWS cloud, while keeping sensitive data and workloads on-premise.

An AWS spokesperson declined to comment on the appliance, citing its policy of not responding to “rumours or speculation.”

Preference for hybrid

Enterprises like hybrid cloud because they can save money from using the public cloud for things like storage and bursting, while maintaining the control private clouds offer. AWS is hoping to gain enterprises’ trust with products such as the hardware storage appliance, which could later translate into more adoption of its public cloud.

“If you want to attract legacy enterprise customers, you’re going to have to build tools that lower barriers to the public cloud,” one AWS partner told CRN US, speak-

ing on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorised to speak about company matters.

The old guard

IBM, Microsoft and VMware all clearly have AWS on the brain.

Which isn’t surprising since AWS is treating the cloud market like its own personal playground.

According to figures from Synergy Research published in late November, AWS now has a 35 percent share of the global infrastructureas-a-service market, compared with 5 percent for IBM and 3 percent for all the other IaaS players combined.

This size of the market gap was backed up by figures from research body Canalys, which claimed that AWS would report $3.8 billion revenues for 2013: more than the next five largest public cloud players combined, which are forecast to turn over $2.4 billion.

VMware execs has urged partners earlier to do everything possible to keep clients from moving workloads to AWS. VMware has AWSfocused marketing collateral on its partner portal, which one partner described to CRN US as “talking points and FUD checklists.”

Microsoft has vowed to match AWS’s constant price cuts with Windows Azure IaaS. Microsoft was one of five vendors that submitted initial bids for the CIA cloud deal. Shortly thereafter, it filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office challenging various aspects of the deal’s mandatory qualification requirements, but was rejected.

IBM is busily positioning SoftLayer, which it acquired in June for

It will take Amazon 10 years to build all of this.

People will be creating businesses with this we can only dream about

Lance Crosby, SoftLayer (IBM)

$2 billion, as more enterprise-ready than AWS. IBM next year plans to add some 100 products and 40 infrastructure services to the SoftLayer cloud, SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby told the New York Times in early December.

“It will take Amazon 10 years to build all of this,” Crosby said.

“People will be creating businesses with this we can only dream about.”

AWS has found one enterprise ally. In a partnership unveiled in November 2012, NetApp has integrated its storage hardware with the AWS cloud, allowing data and workloads to pass securely back and forth from private clouds.

The tie-up brought AWS access to the NetApp channel. Partners must be certified with AWS and NetApp to sell it.

In Australia, AWS is working with Distribution Central, whose CloudSelect offering is hosted on NetApp infrastructure housed at the Equinix data centre.

The AWS-NetApp partnership works because, other than storage, NetApp doesn’t sell products that compete with AWS, one partner of both vendors told CRN US. “NetApp is embracing and running toward AWS, while everyone else is running away and trying to compete,” said the source.

“While there are AWS partners that have closer relationships with the vendor, none of them have the data centre focus of NetApp.” Amazon doesn’t break out cloud revenue, and in general it’s one of the most secretive companies on the planet. However, CRN Australia dug out its first filings to the Australian Securities & Investment Commission since launching AWS down under, covering the 2012-13 financial year. According to the documents, it grew from a $1.3 million business in the six months to 31 December 2011 to a $25.7 million business for the full calendar year to 31 December 2012.

With a dominant share of the cloud market already, AWS is now going for the kill shot by getting enterprises to trust its cloud. That may be a long-term play, but Amazon – as evidenced by Jeff Bezos’ vision for flying delivery drones – is definitely a company that likes to think ahead. ■ Steven Kiernan contributed to this story

54 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

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feature dell

Now comes the hard part Michael Dell’s long, bitter fight to privatise the company he founded is over, but that doesn’t mean he’s on easy street

By Tom Spring

G

one is the bitter battle to take Dell private. Gone is the Wall Street spotlight.

Gone are corporate raider Carl Icahn and his biting tweets.

Now comes the hard part: transforming what founder and chief executive Michael Dell is calling “the world’s biggest startup” into an enterprise solutions channel power.

Just days after Michael Dell successfully completed the US$24.9 billion leveraged buy-out of the company he founded in 1984, he told solution providers attending the Best of Breed Conference, organised by CRN US’s parent, The Channel Company, that he would like to return to the event in the future and be recognised as “your best partner”.

That’s a pretty lofty ambition for a company that, prior to 2007, had no channel program to speak of. Today, the channel represents about US$15 billion, or 25 percent, of Dell’s

nearly US$60 billion in annual revenue. Michael Dell has said that the percentage of Dell sales going through the channel has the potential to reach as much as 60 percent of the company’s commercial sales – with no limit on just how high it could go.

In Australia, Dell’s importance to partners has grown rapidly. Take, for instance, its importance among the 2013 Fast50 companies; it rose to third place, behind only channel behemoths Microsoft and HP. But when you compare the size of the vendor’s channel business to some of its rivals, it’s clear that Dell has a lot of catching up to do.

Seventy percent of Hewlett-Packard’s US$110 billion in revenue comes via the channel, putting its channel business at US$77 billion, more than five times the size of Dell’s. Cisco Systems’ channel business, meanwhile, accounts for around US$39 billion, or 80 percent

We are going to work even more closely with partners to increase our reach

Michael Dell

Q&A with Michael Dell Michael Dell took the hot seat with CRN US, fielding hard questions about the future of the channel and how the company hopes to move the needle on growth.

The company founder sat down for a series of one-on-one interviews to talk about what’s next for Dell. Since the leveraged buyout closed in October, Dell already has made key internal changes to position the company for growth as a private company. Dell appointed Bill Rodrigues, former vice president and

56 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

general manager of global business, as president of Dell North America.

Cheryl Cook, former vice president of enterprise solutions, was named vice president of global channels and alliances, replacing longtime worldwide channel chief Greg Davis, who started the official Dell channel program nearly seven years ago. The net impact of these recent moves by Dell on partners, Michael Dell told CRN US, is a Dell that is “faster, easier, better and bigger.”

of its US$49 billion in sales, according to the company.

Michael Dell is no longer a brash 23-year-old CEO with nothing to lose. At 48, he is betting on a successful second act, leveraging his experience and, more importantly, Dell partners, in his quest to get a bigger bite of the multitrillion-dollar IT solutions apple – a market of which Dell owns a tiny sliver.

Transformation is hard work.

Michael Dell’s critics say the culture and internal politics of the company must change. Key to growth is more effectively leveraging Dell’s 140,000-strong army of worldwide channel partners. And Dell must burn its image as a low-cost hardware supplier and convince the world it is a full-solutions player.

Dell is moving quickly. Just 20 days after its stock was delisted from Nasdaq, the firm moved to tightly integrate its channel business into its sales organisation in 

CRN How does going private help you build a better, faster channel?

Michael Dell: We believe we have a great program today and are really pleased with the progress over the last five years. I’d like to come back [to CRN US parent The Channel Company’s Best of Breed conference] in the future and be your best partner.

I think if you step back and look at the past five years or so, we have taken the channel program at Dell to be about one-third of our commercial business, so order of magnitude we’ll call it a little more than US$15 billion.

This is very substantial. There aren’t many channel programs of US$15 billion or more.

You can probably count them on one hand.

You said the executive changes you’ve made will lead to ‘enormous’ new opportunities for partners and Dell. How? We are going to be working even more closely with our partners to increase our reach and coverage. Our inside teams and our channel teams are going to be working even more closely together. I think it is a fantastic step forward. I am super excited.

Will this supercharge the effort to grow the channel business by an order of magnitude?

The great news is that we have a fantastic set of partners and enormous opportunities to expand because we are not covering all those accounts. We are going to be working even

more closely with our partners to increase reach and coverage. Our inside teams and our channel partners are going to be working even more closely together.

How much more account planning and engagement will we see between partners and the Dell direct team now?

We have made a lot of progress in the last several years, as you are well aware. I think we can make even more now. There was a logical reason to have it be kind of a separate thing when it started. This is a sign of success and maturity in terms of the evolution of our channel program that it is now fully integrated.

It is just part of how we do business at Dell.

What is your strategy to grow the channel faster with partners?

We want to build deeper links to the segment sales organisations we have in the company and continue to build that knowledge of how to leverage each other and grow together.

The set of capabilities that we have – in terms of data centre offerings, storage, networking, systems management, data protection, identity management, security – are unbelievably broad. Having done 30 or so acquisitions, we’ll keep doing acquisitions.

And, of course, as a private company we can be more aggressive. We are thinking about the medium term and the long term. We don’t have to think in 89-day planning cycles. 

www.crn.com.au January 2014 57

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dell feature a change that Michael Dell himself says is designed to accelerate channel sales growth.

The changes, which came just weeks before the start of Dell’s annual Dell World customer and partner event, put both direct and indirect sales under one organisation. The company also named a new president of North America, Bill Rodrigues, and a new vice president of global channels and alliances, Cheryl Cook. Partners say at this point it is difficult to tell whether the duo will pivot toward a direct or indirect sales model. They say only time will tell.

Cook replaces longtime worldwide channel chief Greg Davis, who moves to a new role as Dell’s vice president of software and peripherals. Davis started the official Dell channel program nearly seven years ago and helped build it into what it is today.

Channel evangelist

momentum started by her predecessor, Davis.

“From a strategic lens, we have to expand and grow our presence in certain markets and portfolios where Dell is under-represented.

There are too many opportunities to take, and we need more partners to help us grow,” Cook said in an interview with CRN US. Two of Dell’s biggest challenges going forward will be training partners to cross-sell and boosting the number of top-tier Preferred and Premier partners that now make up only a tiny fraction of Dell’s global partners.

To that end, Dell was on track to deliver 250,000 training courses in 2013 and just introduced four new training programs in its most lucrative business line, software, according to Davis.

One of the changes, Cook told CRN US, will be to incent partners to sell Dell’s full portfolio of products, pushing end-to-end solutions from the client to the server, including security and converged infrastructure. She also says Dell will be working hard to shore up its field engagement to reduce channel conflict and strengthen  partner sales.

Q&A with Michael Dell (cont)

SonicWall, Wyse and EqualLogic – they fit nicely in that midmarket kind of space, and we see these solutions scaling up to the biggest companies in the world.

I think the partners that have really done well with us are the ones that are deeply committed to understanding the Dell portfolio.

They are engaged and with lots of training and have an in-depth understanding of what it is Dell does. That understanding is reciprocal about what Dell knows about its partners.

Dell and other companies is asking ourselves, ‘What happens to the PC space?’ My point of view is the PC is evolving. The obituary of the PC has been written 25 times. The term ‘post-PC era’ was first coined in 1999 by IBM. At the time, there were about 120 million PCs sold per year. Now there are 450 million PCs sold per year. So the post-PC era has been better for the PC than the pre post-PC era.

Today, Michael Dell doesn’t talk a lot about how he reinvented the supply chain and pioneered selling direct. Now, he preaches the channel. Dell’s future, he says, is dependent on solution providers.

“Because of the mix of products and solutions we have now, the indirect channel sale is more profitable than direct,” he says.

“Channel partners are selling more software, more storage, more network, and more servers.”

New key Dell lieutenant Cook, a channel veteran who ran Sun Microsystems’ partner program from 2006 to 2010, is responsible for growing Dell’s PartnerDirect program and continuing the

Talk a little bit about what you expect of your channel partners.

The first thing I will say is we haven’t restricted our program to say, ‘Oh, we only want you to go after these customers.’ Our largest partners and smallest are encouraged to go after the entire set of opportunities out there. We think those opportunities are significant. The fastest growth in our industry is going to continue to be midsize companies; small to mid is actually the largest part of the industry and the fastest-growing.

And if you look at the kinds of solutions that Dell has built and acquired – with

What are a private Dell’s biggest challenges?

We are not too worried. We are feeling pretty good. I think one of the biggest challenges for

How much quicker can Dell change direction and make decisions as a company?

Going private isn’t like everything happens instantaneously. But, you can absolutely accelerate decision-making and 

www.crn.com.au January 2014 59

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dell feature

There aren’t many channel programs of US$15 billion or more. You can probably count them on one hand

Michael Dell

Cook makes no apology for Dell’s direct strategy, stating that the firm is committed to giving businesses a choice in how they want to buy Dell products and services. “Dell has an omnichannel model, which is unique to Dell. We are going to continue to support that.”

That means keeping partners happy while promoting its direct and online business to customers.

“If you have a desktop and server relationship within an account and we want to expand it into other areas, we really want to work jointly with you,” says Frank Vitagliano, vice president of Dell’s channel sales. “The idea is to develop a tight relationship with partners so we both know each other and can help each other reach mutual goals.”

The post-PC era

But Michael Dell has some big legacy issues to address to convert the channel masses to the Dell gospel. Talk to Dell partners and you hear a common refrain that the company is still, at its roots, a direct sales outfit.

CRN US spoke with more than a dozen large and midsize North American Dell partners prior to the management shake-up. Each praised Dell products and services.

But each also complained that Dell – more so than other OEMs they do business with – makes it difficult and time-consuming to register deals. Sometimes, they claim, overzealous Dell direct sales reps outright steal deals from them.

Dell’s company line is it is channel-neutral, meaning there is no financial incentive for Dell’s direct sales team to exclude a channel partner from a deal. Dell’s sales reps are compensated at the same rate whether a deal is done direct or with a partner, Davis says. This can be a conflict as some direct salespeople feel more in control if they handle a deal themselves, and the compensation plan does not push them to work with the channel.

Dell rejects 29 percent of deals partners try to register, according to Davis. Dell does around 1,800-2,000 registrations a week, he says, adding there are always going to be some deals that don’t get approved.

Q&A with Michael Dell (cont)

Talk about Dell World.

Dell World is going to be awesome. We have tremendous engagement [with partners]. We are going to have 5,000-plus customers and partners from around the world. It’ll be the biggest Dell World ever.

simplify things. For example, we built up a lot of reporting inside the company over time.

And, you look at all this reporting and say what are we doing here? Now we can say which of this stuff do we really need and what’s important? Growth and cash flow – everything else, forget about it. Being private simplifies everything, streamlines everything, and we can go faster.

How mature is the channel business and when do you think you will cross the 50 percent of total sales barrier?

I think it will help us go faster.

With Dell as a private company, what can partners expect a year from now?

More channel love.

From a strategic standpoint, why bet on Dell versus one of your competitors such as Hewlett-Packard or IBM? Growth. We are growing faster than the market and our competition on a number of different

After years spending billions on beefing up services and acquiring 30 companies, Dell is still first and foremost a PC company, with the bulk of its revenue tied to client device sales. Its next chapter must include stepping away from selling commodity boxes and moving into lucrative software and services.

But dropping out of the PC market is not something Michael Dell says he wants for his company – today the third-largest PC maker. Even with PC shipments expected to drop 8 percent worldwide this year, according to IDC and Gartner, Dell says two out of three business customers’ first experience with Dell is buying a PC. About 90 percent of those go on to buy other products and services from Dell.

“The obituary of the PC has been  written 25 times. The term levels. If you look at our 12th-generation servers, we are clearly gaining share on a consistent basis. From a product feature and capabilities standpoint, we are beating the competition.

We are 20 percent bigger [in server sales] than the number two guy here in North America.

We have innovative products such as our PowerEdge VRTX. We are very aggressive about pushing the limits to what converged infrastructure looks like. And we are very affordable.

In terms of the go-to-market? For one, we are ‘one Dell.’ We have one relationship with our partners; we have a segment sales  organisation. That makes us quite easy

www.crn.com.au January 2014 61

feature dell ‘post-PC era’ was first coined in 1999 by IBM. At the time, there were about 120 million PCs sold per year.

Now there are 450 million PCs sold per year. So the post-PC era has been better for the PC than the ‘pre post-PC era’,” says Michael Dell.

Dell’s primary objective isn’t ditching the PC; rather, it’s how to muscle into the data centres of tomorrow where it can sell lucrative software and services. The challenge for Dell is how to get there. To that end, with PC sales driving cash flow and acting as a springboard to new business, Michael Dell says it comes down to internal leadership to turn old Dell into new Dell.

Vitagliano, a 30-year industry veteran and former channel chief at Juniper Networks, was hired in April and is part of Dell’s effort to win SMB deals. SMB is the fastestgrowing segment of Dell, with huge potential as clients’ needs scale up into the data centre as they grow.

Reflecting the customer

Dell is prepping itself to cater to the customers it wants. To achieve this goal, Michael Dell says he’s gone to great pains to reorganise Dell into four businesses (end user computing, enterprise solutions, software and services) to reflect his customers – consumer, SMB and large enterprise. Each business has its own leader who knows how go to market with very clear priorities, he says. Jeff Clarke oversees end user computing, Haas leads Dell’s enterprise solutions group, John Swainson heads software, and Suresh Vaswani runs services.

According to Dell’s last reported numbers as a public company, the

Q&A with Michael Dell (cont) to work with versus other programs that are a little more disconnected or disparate in the way they are organied.

Our channel program is simple and easy to understand. We have rebates from the first dollar of sale, we have incentives to grow and cross-sell our product line and offer new greenfield account bonuses. Let’s face it, we are pervasive.

Lastly, I would say that we are underrepresented, relative to mind share and actual share that we have. There are a lot of accounts out there where we have a beachhead in one product area.

62 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

four business units are having mixed success. The enterprise solutions business grew 8 percent year over year, with revenue of US$3.3 billion in the second fiscal quarter, ended 2 August. Dell services saw anemic year-over-year growth of 2 percent, reporting US$2.1 billion revenue, and its software division reported US$310 million in revenue and an operating loss of US$62 million, a 20.1 percent drop year over year.

End user computing reported revenue of US$9.1 billion, a 5 percent drop compared with the year-ago quarter.

Some of those losses in its software division track back to big investments Dell is making in research and development, according to the company’s financial report. Michael Dell says spending in R&D is growing 25 percent year over year. “We are investing heavily in organic growth. We have an army of 20,000 developers and engineers developing new products and software,” he says.

R&D spending at Dell has been low relative to its peers, estimated at US$1 billion a year, or 1.5 percent of revenue.

By comparison, HP spends 2.8 percent of its revenue on R&D and Cisco spends 12 percent, according to a Bloomberg analysis. Why is R&D so important? With Dell’s ageing PC business and cloud computing on the rise – ultimately meaning Dell will sell less hardware – it needs new tricks in a hurry if it wants to grow.

Now it’s up to our partners to help us expand that to other areas where they have skills, expertise and knowledge.

How do you manage channel conflict from the direct side of the business to the indirect side of the business?

At my level, it’s strategy and philosophy. First thing we’ve done is make our teams indifferent. Give the customer choice.

That’s helped. And when there is channel conflict, it’s real simple. All ties break in favour of partners. That’s kind of the way we do it.

The next thing is our deal registration, product registration and customer

Michael Dell seems to agree, telling CRN US that being competitive “requires more R&D, more capabilities and having the innovative solutions to help a company accomplish their goals”. And now, as a private company, he can make R&D a priority.

As for access to capital, he says being a private company makes a big difference. “We have access to all the capital we need. The capital structure we have is better. It is more flexible and allows us to invest more in channel partners, R&D and growth now that we don’t have this short-term pressure.”

Innovative thinking

Some of its innovations include Dell’s Compellent flash-optimised storage, which uses a mix of flash and disk drives for higher performance and lower cost, and Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX, which combines servers, storage, networking and management software into a single box.

All this transformation is hard work. One of the biggest headscratchers for many outsiders is why does Michael Dell – the 25th richest person on Earth, with a personal wealth of US$16 billion, according to Forbes – want to tackle the enormous task of remaking Dell?

“You ever try doing nothing for a while?” he says. “You look at all the big unsolved problems out there – the environment, education and health care. A lot of those problems are computational. Our potential for good is what motivates me.” ■ Steven Burke contributed to this story registration. We keep evolving the registration capabilities. That has helped us have a clear understanding of who is supposed to be doing what. That helps a lot.

What we hear is every one of our competitors has issues. I think the real opportunity is understanding each other’s capabilities.

We want to move from, ‘Hey, we did some transactions’ to ‘Hey, we really understand each other, we have a relationship and we have trust. We are married and we are going to make this work.’

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CRNTech

Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business Core Feature-packed malware protection that’s easy to deploy and manage from a well-designed central console

M

any SMBs find deploying network security a daunting prospect, but Kaspersky aims to take the fear out of the job through simplification. Its latest Endpoint Security for Business (ESB) software offers a huge range of options, including anti-malware for servers and workstations, patch management and mobile device security, yet everything can be deployed and managed from a single console.

ESB comes in four flavours. On review, we had the base Core edition, which comprises the Security Center console and anti-malware for workstations, but there’s also the Select edition, which adds file-server and mobile device protection, plus application controls; the Advanced edition for encryption and systems management; and Total, which bolsters this with mail-server, gateway and collaboration security.

Each package can be expanded with extra modules, as the need arises.

Security Center takes only a few minutes to install; it then loads all the relevant updates and signature databases from the Kaspersky

All tasks – including client deployment, management and reporting – are centralised in Kaspersky’s Security Center console

64 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

support site. The main console hasn’t seen any major design changes for a few years but, unlike AVG’s Internet Security Business Edition 2013, it still works very well.

There are plenty of workstation deployment options, and it’s worth checking them out first determine the best method. The console’s search facilities show anything from subnet or workgroup contents to lists of Active Directory (AD) computers. The Network Agent and Endpoint Security components can then be deployed manually by selecting multiple systems from one of the searches and pushing both components to them in one go. Alternatively, users can pick a single system and fire the software straight at it. Automatic installation is quickest: add all unassigned systems to a console group with this feature enabled, and it will do it automatically.

For testing, we used virtual Windows XP, 7 and 8 clients hosted on VMware ESX and Hyper-V servers. All systems were AD domain members and all were listed correctly by the console search facility. We found workstation deployment took at least 15 minutes per system, which is slower than AVG’s Business Edition 2013. However, we found Kaspersky to be less resource-hungry, with CPU usage rarely going above 50 percent.

Once installed, the software uses group policies to control how Network Agent and Endpoint Security behave and are applied when a client joins a group.

Subgroups can be created, which inherit settings from the top level or have their own policies.

With group polices in action, users can’t fiddle with the Endpoint Security client settings, but they can load its console, see what’s going on and run custom malware scans.

Policies also keep users out of the

decision process when malware is detected. When we introduced a selection of malware to our test clients, Endpoint Security blocked them all, disinfected or deleted the dodgy files, posted warnings in the Security Center console and alerted us via email.

Dave Mitchell

Channel Angle Distributors WhiteGold Solutions, Hemisphere Launched February 2013 RRP $4-$50 per node for one-year subscription, depending on the scale of rollout Next product below in the range Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business - Core Next product above in the range Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business - Select The reviewers say "Kaspersky’s Endpoint for Business Core is slightly more costly than several competing security products, but it’s worth the extra outlay. It provides sophisticated workstation anti-malware, which performs well and can be upgraded with further security measures whenever you need them."

How to pitch it The Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business range offers businesses of all sizes the tools to respond to emerging cyber security trends and threats. Through a holistic approach, the product removes the complexity behind ensuring IT security policy conformity; enables a mobile workforce; and offers protection against malware.

CRNTech

GFI LanGuard 2014 LanGuard 2014 excels at patch management and adds mobile functionality to the mix

L

anGuard 2014 extends its scope to mobile devices. Using agent-less scanning, it now detects iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices, advises on missing updates and provides information on hardware, OS version and connection times.

LanGuard’s main focus is security assessment and patch management of Windows systems, but GFI has also added support for popular Linux distributions.

Users can choose from agent-less and agent-based scans. The former leaves no footprint, but generates more network traffic. The agent reduces network overheads by gathering information locally and sending a small XML file to the host.

We deployed the agent to an Active Directory domain controller, an Exchange 2007 server and Windows 7 and 8 workstations. The dashboard lists scan results, the

most vulnerable systems and details on missing service packs, patches, updates, firewall issues and malware protection.

The mobile-scanning feature works with Exchange Server ActiveSync. The server acts as an information source, and LanGuard adds detected mobile devices to a separate tab in its device tree. It lists each email account that has a mobile device partnership, and users with multiple devices are listed under their email address.

For our test iPad, LanGuard showed its iOS version and last sync time, along with a list of vulnerabilities.

However, it didn’t show the device serial number and mistook our Wi-Fionly model for a 3G model.

David Mitchell

Channel Angle

Distributors SoftGen, Ingram Micro

RRP $5,277 ex GST for the full software licence and 12 months of automatic product updates The reviewers say "While mobile device support is basic, LanGuard 2014 remains a powerful tool: it provides a range of security services and helps keep a watchful eye on vulnerable systems" How to pitch it LANGuard provides three key network security needs: full network vulnerability assessment of all computers and devices in the business; central patch management detection, download and remote deployment for all operating systems and third party applications; and ongoing IT asset management and reporting of IT infrastructure including change logs, software control, hardware registry and compliance reporting suite.

SolarWinds BAP

LanGuard 2014’s console now gives information on mobile devices

BAP’s various tools provide detailed flow data analysis

Bandwidth Analyzer Pack is the perfect package for network monitoring and flow data analysis

S

olarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack (BAP) takes the company’s Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and adds its NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) to create a versatile networkmonitoring package.

Despite being two separate products, both are managed from the same Orion web console. It’s necessary to install NPM and run its Sonar Discovery before loading NTA, however, so that flowenabled devices and interfaces can be discovered and added to the NPM database.

We left Sonar to examine our lab network and it found all our systems including Windows 7 and 8 workstations, 2008 R2 and 2012

servers, VMware hosts, switches and routers.

NPM’s LUCID interface gives a summary of network activity, SNMP and WMI device status and alerts.

The interface is fully customisable, so users can easily build their own network views.

Along with support for wireless networks, NPM comes up trumps for VMware and Hyper-V monitoring tools. Ipswitch’s rival package, WhatsUp Gold, requires an optional module for VMware and still can’t monitor Hyper-V. We had our NetFlow sources already set to use the NTA server as a target – their traffic was picked up automatically and the relevant interfaces were added to the NTA

console. It details all flow traffic, with graphs for detected applications, top conversations and busiest endpoints.

The application graphs display the amount of bandwidth used by email, web browsing, VoIP, FTP and media streaming.

David Mitchell

Channel Angle Distributors Ingram Micro, M.Tech RRP According to Ingram, the starting tier is NPM/NTA 100 and RRP is $6,290 The reviewers say "SolarWinds’ BAP is a great-value package. NPM and NTA make fine allies, and dredge up a wealth of network-related information." www.crn.com.au January 2014 65

CRNTech

Getac X500 Mobile Server When the going gets tough, Getac’s X500 Mobile Server will stay the course

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Key Specs 1.7GHz Intel Core i7-820QM • 16GB DDR3 RAM • Nvidia GeForce GT 330M • 15.6in 1,920 x 1,080 LCD panel • 500GB WD SFF SATA HDD • 3 x USB 2 • 1 x USB 2/ eSATA • 2 x serial • HDMI • D-SUB • 2 x PCMCIA • ExpressCard/34 and /54 • smart card reader • 3.5mm audio in/out • Intel 802.11abgn Wi-Fi • Bluetooth • fingerprint reader • 2 x Gigabit Ethernet • dual battery packs • RAID expansion unit with 5 x 1TB WD SATA HDD and Adaptec RAID 6805 • Windows Server 2012 Standard • 8.6kg • 410 x 320 x 119mm (WDH)

ot content with producing some of the toughest laptops on the market, Getac has branched out with the rough-andtumble X500 Mobile Server. Built to handle the harshest environments, the X500 will go where normal servers would fear to tread.

It has been designed to provide an off-the-shelf Windows server for field engineers, emergency services and even battlefield command operations.

From the moment you pick up this 8.6kg briefcase by its metal carry handle, you just know it’s up to the job.

Clothed in a magnesium alloy shell, the X500 is tested to the MIL-STD-810G standard. This validates resistance to high and low temperatures, high altitude, exposure to fluids, dust, sand and fungus, repeated drops from 1.2 metres and much more besides.

The X500’s IP65 rating means it’s fully dust-resistant and capable of shrugging off low-power water jets from any angle. If it bumps into anything, the thick rubber buffers on its corners and around the 1,920x1,080 screen mean it will simply bounce off.

The X500 has what it takes on the inside, too. The price includes Windows Server 2012, and while the 1.7GHz Intel Core i7-820QM quadcore CPU is several generations old, it has more than enough grunt to keep things running smoothly. Our review unit came filled with the maximum 16GB of DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M graphics chipset.

In its basic form, the X500 stands at around 64mm high, but our

66 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

system had the optional RAID expansion unit fitted, which swells the chassis to 119mm. This is just as rugged as the main unit, and accommodates five SFF SATA drives in shock-proof caddies.

Three are accessed from the front, behind a dropdown panel, while two more can be found on the back. The expansion unit incorporates an Adaptec 6805 RAID controller that supports all key array types, including RAID6, and drive hotswapping.

The expansion unit links to a dedicated port on the motherboard and The X500 is as rugged and portable as servers can get appears to Windows is also present, but GPS and 3G are Server 2012 as a bunch of optional extras. local hard disks. Using the Adaptec With both battery packs onboard, Storage Manager utility, we could create, delete and monitor our arrays; the X500 has a decent reserve of stamina. To simulate heavy use, the expansion unit’s five status LEDs we set Iometer running on all the warn of any issues.

The 15.6-inch Full HD screen boasts hard disks and RAID arrays with an equal mix of continuous random a maximum brightness of 800cd/ and sequential reads and writes. In m2, and it’s easily bright enough this test, the X500 lasted 3hrs 16mins. to be used in direct sunlight. A In a light-use test, without Iometer front-facing camera is an optional running, it managed 4hrs 25mins. extra, as is a resistive touchscreen Dave Mitchell that’s suitable for use with gloves, and there’s an AuthenTec fingerprint reader on the screen’s lower bezel.

Channel Angle The case is bristling with ports, Distributors Synnex Australia each protected behind an individual Launched May 2013 locking hatch. At the back are two RRP $9,995 inc GST USB 2 ports (with the lower one The reviewers say "For those who need a doubling up for eSATA devices), two go-anywhere server, the X500’s hardened serial ports, HDMI, D-SUB, a 3.5mm exterior is the perfect candidate for a range of audio input and output jacks. There outdoor scenarios." are dual Gigabit Ethernet sockets, too.

How to pitch it X500 Rugged Mobile To the right is the standard battery Server is designed for mobile command pack, and further back is a hard disk centers, the new briefcase-size X500 rugged bay with a 500GB Western Digital mobile server is a commercial off-the-shelf SFF SATA hard disk. Two more (COTS), high-performance, mobile, rugged USB ports sit opposite, plus slots server that provides quick deployment and for PCMCIA, ExpressCard/34 and can be easily transported into emergency, ExpressCard/54, a smart card reader disaster and temporary set-up across and a multifunction slot for a second Australia and overseas. Ideal for defence, battery pack, DVD drive or another emergency services and mining sites. hard disk. Intel 802.11abgn wireless

CRNTech

D-Link DNR-2060-08P JustConnect This device offers IP surveillance at a competitive price

D

igital surveillance is becoming a reality for small businesses as IP camera prices come tumbling down. D-Link’s DNR2060-08P provides an easy-todeploy video-recording station for making the most of up to eight of them. It’s supplied diskless, so users need to add their own disks in the six internal trays.

The box has HDMI and D-SUB video outputs for viewing and controlling the camera feeds. It also allows users to configure the DVR via an onscreen menu, and has an array of control buttons, plus a jog dial at the front. A remote-control handset is also included.

We fitted a 2TB Seagate drive using one of the four SATA ports at the front of the board. Next, we connected the DVR to the network, for remote access, and hit the power button. Network setup is straightforward and camera

installation is simple, too: plug your cameras into the eight-port Power-overEthernet Plus switch at the back and wait for their The D-Link offers HDMI, D-SUB and USB feeds to materialise on the ports for video output main screen.

It’s worth noting, however, that Launched 1 November 2013 the DVR works only with D-Link’s What is the next product below in the IP cameras: we tried Axis and range? DNR-326 (two-bay nine-channel Trendnet devices, and while they network video recorder) received power, the DVR ignored The reviewers say "As a standalone or them. D-Link’s DCS-7513 and DCSnetworked video surveillance system, the D-Link 6511 Power-over-Ethernet cameras DNR-2060-08P is highly versatile. It’s easy to worked fine; their feeds popped install and use, but the lack of support for other up about a minute after being vendors’ cameras will limit its appeal." connected. The DVR’s Power-overHow to pitch it The D-Link DNR-2060-08P Ethernet Plus power budget of 90W six-bay network video recorder offers is low, though: it can feed only four simultaneous live viewing, recording and remote high-power cameras. access to recorded video. It supports up to eight Dave Mitchell cameras and offers eight built-in Gigabit PoE Channel Angle ports. The DNR-20160-08P can take up to six Distributors Ingram Micro, Synnex, Bluechip IT SATA hard drives for video footage storage.

RRP $2,049 inc GST

Key Specs DNR-2060-08P desktop unit • 6 x SATA II drive bays • eight-port 10/100 PoE+ switch • HDMI • D-SUB • 3 x USB 2 • eSATA • I/O connector block • RCA audio out • 90W PoE power budget • supports H.264/ MJPEG • 1080p max resolution • Gigabit Ethernet web management • remote-control handset • 440 x 451 x 90mm (WDH) • 5yr RTB warranty

TP-Link TL-SG1008PE A plug-and-play PoE+ eight-port Gigabit ethernet switch for SoHos and SMBs

T

P-Link is garnering quite a reputation for delivering lowcost networking products to SoHos and SMBs. This desktop switch provides eight Gigabit ports, all of which support Power-over-Ethernet and Powerover-Ethernet Plus.

Compromises have been made to keep the price down: the switch is unmanaged, and it has a maximum power output of 124W. The Power-overEthernet Plus standard calls for 25.5W of power to be supplied on each port, so the switch’s power budget means it can support a maximum of five highpower devices. There’s no problem with standardPower-over-Ethernetdevices, though; there’s enough juice on tap to deliver the required 15.4W to all ports. The front panel provides plenty of status LEDs to keep you apprised of power usage and activity, including the

port operating speed. The switch has a built-in warning threshold of 118W: if you’re using between 118W and 124W, a separate red LED will light up; if you go up to or over 124W, it will start flashing.

Without a web interface or CLI access, it isn’t possible to assign power priorities to critical devices. However, the switch operates a simple, hardcoded prioritisation system based on the port number. Essentially, the higher the port number, the lower the power priority. If the power budget is reached, the switch will start powering off devices in reverse order.

Consequently, Power-over-Ethernet Plus devices must be on ports one to four to ensure they receive the lion’s share. Dave Mitchell

Channel Angle

Distributors Dicker Data, Anyware, Altech

Launched July 2013 RRP $299 Next product below in the range TL-SG2424P Next product above in the range TL-SG2210P The reviewers say "If you need to enable your network for Power-over-Ethernet Plus and upgrade to Gigabit at the same time, this TP-Link switch is the one to go for. " How to pitch it With a total power budget of 124W, up to 30W per port, TL-SG1008PE can power more high-powered devices such as wireless access points, IP cameras or IP phones.

Moreover, with innovative energy-efficient technology, the TL-SG1008PE can save up to 75 percent of the power consumption, making it an eco-friendly solution for your business network.

The TL-SG1008PE supports PoE and PoE+ across eight ports at a very reasonable price

Key Specs Desktop/1U rack chassis • 8 x Gigabit Ethernet • supports 802.3af/at on all ports • 124W power budget • 16Gbits/ sec backplane capacity • internal PSU • 5yr RTB warranty

www.crn.com.au January 2014 67

channel life out & about

Avnetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sci-fi Christmas cruise

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Distributor Avnet celebrated the holiday season with a futuristic sci-fi-themed boat party on Sydney Harbour in December.

From Star Wars to Star Trek to, erm, Toy Story, vendors and channel partners got into the swing of things by dressing up as their favourite characters from pop culture 2

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1. David Andrews, Sameer Pradhan, Remco Faasse and Tim Latham from IBM 2. Tony Edwards from Citrix with Jason Spindlow and Luke Girgis from Avnet 3. Ian Mackie, Sean Craig, Michael Porfirio and Debbie Jessup from CommVault 4. Anthony Higgins from CustomTec, Kit Craig from IBM, Karthik Subramanyam from CustomTec, with Vinelli Alarcon from IBM and Moheb Moses from Channel Dynamics 5. James Ross from CDM, Stephen Croshaw from Avnet Technology Solutions and Carl Dubois from CDM 6. Vladimir Matijevic, Nathan Brooker, Anna Soriano, Ward Nash and Zlatka Cvijanovic from Dell Wyse

68 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

out and about

channel life

Newlease Christmas drinks Cloud aggregator Newlease hosted its holiday drinks event at O Bar on L47 Australia Square.

The Newlease team mingled with channel partners and vendors while taking in breathtaking views of the harbour city while sharing drinks and canapés.

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1. Chill IT’s Natalie Stuart and Savannah Scuglia and Newlease’s Leticia Zannier; 2. CopySoft’s Joe Cardinale, Elizabeth Johnson and Stephen Tritton ; 3. Macquarie’s Joe Vella, Newlease’s Julie Cooper and NextDC’s Glen Hastings 4. Veeam’s Don Williams and Newlease’s Carolyn Agombar; 5. Artis’s Jason Cole, Newlease’s John Derbogosian and Cyber Eagle’s Claudius Sithole

MYOB volunteers at Oasis Youth Support Network Some 15 employees of MYOB Sydney assisted with the packing of candle bags for the 31st annual Woolworths Carols in the Domain Christmas concert held on Saturday 21 December.

The day, one of the year’s biggest fundraisers for the Oasis Youth Support Network, involved assisting in setting up of the packing stations, packing the bags and the packing down of the workspace.

The Oasis Youth Support Network is The Salvation Army’s response to youth homelessness. It offers more than 25 innovative programs and services to disadvantaged and homeless young people in Sydney’s inner city. It aims to offer young people hope, help and opportunities to turn their lives around.

In 2012, Oasis sold more than 9000 candle bags and raised over $125,000. www.crn.com.au January 2014 69

channel life accolades

Brisbane’s Prescience Technology lauded as Oracle’s Primavera Partner of the Year for 2013

Bayliss: “Thrilled and proud to be recognised by Oracle Partner Network”

Brisbane-based independent consulting firm, Prescience Technology, has been recognised as Oracle’s 2013 Excellence Award Partner of the Year: Primavera, Australian & New Zealand.

The award was announced at Oracle’s annual Executive Partner Forum 2013 at the end of last year.

Prescience Technology won due to its success in demonstrating outstanding capabilities around Oracle’s Primavera software.

Oracle’s specialised partner awards are presented for outstanding performance around Oracle products and technology. They reflect a partner’s ability to create value and innovative solutions for customers, as well as generating new business potential for Oracle.

Prescience Technology managing director Loretta Bayliss said: “I am thrilled and proud to be recognised

by Oracle Partner Network with this award. As a gold-level member of OPN since 2006, Prescience Technology offers extensive

experience by having the ability to combine business and technical expertise with project management techniques.

“We use those skills to create innovative and valuable solutions for our clients and it’s an honour to be recognised by Oracle for our work.

I’d like to thank our clients, partners and the entire Prescience team for helping us to achieve such consistent and continued success.”

Oracle vice-president, international sales Giuseppe Rossi congratulated Prescience Technology, saying the company had demonstrated tangible success with Oracle’s complete, open and integrated products and technology.

“Bringing innovation and excellence, they have delivered to our customers winning, proven solutions that solve their most critical business challenges.

“We thank Prescience Technology for their commitment and wish them greater success in the year ahead,” added Rossi.

CEO Magazine names Nick Verykios as its IT executive of the year Distribution Central managing director Nick Verykios was named IT Executive of the Year at the 2013 CEO Magazine Executive of the Year Awards at the end of 2013. This latest recognition capped off a winning streak for Distribution Central, which is celebrating its first decade of operation.

In November, DC chief executive Scott Frew received special recog nition as the Pearcy Foundation’s NSW 2013 ICT Entrepreneur of the Year, for “taking a risk and making a difference to the Australian ICT industry.”

And BRW ranked the company 31st in its 2013 BRW 50 Best Places to Work – the fifth consecutive year DC has made the top 50.

“We’ve experienced incredible growth in our 10 years of operation 70 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

at DC, and received a raft of business and industry accolades for the business.

While we’ve both had colourful careers to date, these recent individual accolades are a testament to our contribution and success as entrepreneurs, which is personally significant to us,” said Frew who made special mention of the team which has helped make he and Verykios successful.

“Backed by an incredible team, we are seeing the benefits of the investments we have made in the past year in systems, staff and further innovation.”

Nick Verykios, Distribution Central

accolades

channel life

AVG once again voted best vendor

by Computer Troubleshooters AVG Technologies has been named Vendor of the Year by the Australian Computer Troubleshooters Franchise Network (FNCTA) for the fifth time in six years.

FNCTA national director Nick Roche said: “It is clear from the scoring that underpinning AVG’s well-respected and recognisable brand is its winning combination of consistently high-quality service and the revenue-generating innovations it keeps introducing to its reseller program.”

AVG channel sales director Michael Dowling said the award was much valued recognition for the channel support team. “We are very proud to again be rewarded for our efforts by the Computer Troubleshooters Franchise Network.

“An award of this stature helps inspire us to keep finding new ways to help the reseller community increase margins and retain their small business customers.”

Dowling said that a key factor behind AVG’s continuing success is its excellent, locally based support

Amcom takes first place at Cisco ANZ Marketing Awards Amcom has won Cisco’s highest marketing honour, coming first against a field filled with Australia and New Zealand’s information, communication, and technology heavyweights, at the 2013 Cisco Marketing awards in the enterprise category.

The awards are part of Cisco’s Global Velocity Marketing Awards program and will be presented in Chicago in May 2014.

Amcom chief operating officer Michael Knee said the win was testament to the marketing team’s dedication, commitment and passion.

The award was specifically handed down for the launch of Amcom Cloud Collaboration (ACC), which was built on Cisco’s HCS platform, and was judged against a range of strict criteria.

crew, which operates from AVG offices in Cheltenham, Victoria.

The judges’ comments underscored that by recognising that at AVG there were no language or time zone barriers; response times were fast; and the team understood their business and end customer

needs. The judges acknowledged AVG’s diversity of its product, the design of its reseller program and its very favourable pricing for partners that have small to medium client bases.

AVG previously won the award in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012.

Aria Technologies wins APAC and Africa partner award Unified communications company Aria Technologies has been awarded the Ericsson-LG Asia Pacific & Africa Partner of the Year 2013 for outstanding performance and achievement in marketing and sales in the region.

According to Technologies chief executive Rob Pierce, “This award recognises the hard work by the team as well as reaffirming the strong relationship we have with Ericsson-LG. “The award was won for not only hitting our sales targets, but our work with our carrier partners – particularly Telstra – to develop innovative sales and marketing programs.

“That, coupled with our close partnership with Ericsson-LG engineers to enhance products

for our market, was a big factor in winning this award,” added Pierce.

Ahed Alkhatib, director of global sales at Ericsson-LG, congratulated Pierce, saying that he recognised and appreciated the continuous hard work done by Aria in the region.

“I’m sure we’ll see them collect many more awards in the future too,” added Alkhatib.

In 2014, Aria Technologies will further cement its relationship by launching the Ericsson-LG iPECSCM Enterprise IP Communications Solution for medium and large businesses, providing IP telephony, multimedia, applications, and mobility services over IP environments.

The iPECS-CM will launch in February 2014 with roadshows in most major Australian cities. www.crn.com.au January 2014 71

channel life on the move

Masters closes a chapter to finish a book As Express Data closed its offices for Christmas, its marketing manager Peter Masters closed the book on his 17-year career with the company.

Following the big decision, Masters will spend the next four months writing his own book, a project that has already consumed the past three years.

Meanwhile Express Data is still looking to appoint both a chief executive, following the departure of David Gage in October, and now a marketing manager.

While Masters wouldn’t be drawn on any details, he suggested there may be news early in the new year.

Masters told CRN his book would focus on leadership and what sets successful leaders apart from the pack. The project will allow him to pursue his passion for finding lessons from the experiences of modern leaders such as Winston Churchill and Sir John Monash to historical figures such as Genghis Khan and Alexander the great.

This passion will not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever attended an Express Data kick-off. Each year, Masters has taken the stage and focussed his presentation on a single leader, applying lessons from the story of that figure’s life and influence to contemporary business.

“Look at Genghis Khan; he applied disruptive technology and innovation to conquer the known world. He didn’t necessarily invent the technology though... stirrups

Adobe appoints new channel chief

Adobe has appointed Muralee Kanagaratnam (left) to head its Australian channel business, replacing Steve Martin.

Last year was especially significant for Adobe as it transitioned to Creative Cloud while continuing to drive its Acrobat and Education businesses, according to Peter McAlpine, head of channel sales for Asia Pacific for Adobe.

“I’d like to thank Steve for his fantastic contribution to Adobe and wish him every success in the future. Under Steve’s leadership, the ANZ region led the world in the adoption of Creative Cloud for teams,” said McAlpine.

Keith Murray to lead Dimension Data’s outsourcing business

Dimension Data has appointed Keith Murray as its director of managed services to take charge of IT outsourcing, adding to his current responsibility for cloud services. The restructure merges Dimension Data’s services portfolio under a single exec.

Dimension Data chief exec Rodd Cunico said: “Keith has been with Dimension Data since 2009 and has been responsible for the company’s managed services business, which has grown steadily. His skills and experience in general management, leadership, sales and engineering will greatly benefit our go-to-market, sales and service delivery for this important portfolio.”

72 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

were already used by horsemen but Khan taught troops to shoot from horseback by getting them to wait until all four hooves were off the ground before they fired. This provided maximum stability.

Master said his career at Express Data was a continuous highlight.

“This has always been a very successful and profitable business.”

Masters said the biggest change during his time at Express Data related to the way companies market to the channel. “Everything is much more targeted now. We have gone from 15,000 resellers down to 2000 when you look at who writes 98 percent of the business. Market intelligence is much more important now than ever before. Engineering opportunities is what it is all about and that means you need to know the customer really well.”

Masters also has an eye on corporate training and coaching. “There is very little executive skills training in Australia in marketing and branding and I am keen to explore than opportunity.”

AMD names David Bennett as Asia Pac-Japan lead

David Bennett is the new corporate vice president Asia Pacific-Japan (APJ) for AMD, reporting to senior vice president and chief sales officer John Byrne. In this role, Bennett will lead the company’s operations and sales efforts across the region in countries including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Bennett has more than six years at the company, most recently leading AMD’s growth in client, server and embedded platforms as worldwide sales director for the HP account.

Nigel Lutton to lead IT Vision

Nigel Lutton is the new chief executive of IT Vision.

The board said Lutton was selected to spearhead the company’s next phase of growth, which will involve expanding into NSW and Queensland.

2013 was a banner year for IT Vision IT, having grown its client base, increased its headcount and seen product adoption rates growing and it is on track to break all previous financial and performance targets this year.

index

NEXT MONTH

The Internet of Things

By 2020, there will be tens of billions of devices talking to each other. What does this interconnected world mean for integrators, developers and resellers?

People David Adams 32, 36, 38 Darren Adams 34 Carolyn Agombar 67 Ahed Alkhatib 71 David Andrews 66 Loretta Bayliss 70 David Bennett 72 Nathan Brooker 66 David Campbell 27 Tom Canning 47 Joe Cardinale 67 Andrew Cheeseman 47 Zlatka Cvijanovic 66 Sean Craig 66 Stephen Crowshaw 66 Michael Dell 56, 57, 59, 61, 62 John Derbogosian 67 John Donovan 35, 38 Michael Dowling 71 Peter Drummond 13 Carl Dubois 66 David Elliot 27, 28, 32 Tony Edwards 66 Remco Faasse 66 Matt Fairhurst 46 Kevin Francis 51 Scott Frew 71 Lawrence Gatica 26, 27, 28, 32 Luke Girgis 66 Danny Gorog 19, 51 Kris Hansen 34, 36 Peter Hewett 27, 28, 32 Anthony Higgins 66 Debbie Jessup 66 Elizabeth Johnson 67 Steve Jones 26, 27 Muralee Kanagaratanam 72 Ray Kloss 34, 36, 38 Michael Knee 71 Tim Latham 66 Nick Lennon 26,27, 32 Angela Logan-Bell 27, 28, 30 Mona Lolas 34, 35 Nigel Lutton

Ian Mackie 66 Vladimir Matijevic 66 Andrew Mamonitis 35, 38 Mohab Moses 66 Peter Masters, 72 Keith Murray Ward Nash 66 Warren Nolan 27, 28, 30 Rob Pierce 71 Michael Porfirio 66 Sameer Pradhan 66 Bruce Rasmussen 26, 27, 32 Chris Ridd 47 Andrew Rigney 46 Nick Roche 71 James Ross 66 Jason Rylands 27, 28 Savannah Scuglia 67 Mark Shannon 35 Claudius Sithole 67 Anna Soriano 66 Jason Spindlow 66 Natalie Stuart 67 Kathic Subramanyam 66 Stephen Tritton 67 Joe Vella 67 Vijay Valayatham 35 Nick Verykios 71 Audrey William Don Williams 67 Leticia Zannier 67 Companies ac3 13 Adobe 72 Amcon 71 AMD 72 Anittel 12 Apple 10, 18 Avaya 27 Aria Technologies 71 AVG Technologies 71 Avnet Solutions 32, 36, 38, 66 Artis 67 AWS 22, 23, 52, 53, 54 BigAir 12

Brennan IT 47 Carpe Diem 27 CDM 66 Channel Dynamics 66 Chill IT 67 Cisco 71 Cloud Plus 22 CommBank 47 Commvault 66 CustomTech 66 Cyber Eagle 67 Dell 35, 38, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 66 Dimension Data 72 Distribution Central 27, 70 DPSA 27 Express Data 27, 72 Frost & Sullivan 51 Fujitsu 27 Gartner 46 GFI Software 34, 36 Google 10,47 HP 10 Huawei 27 IBM 52, 53, 54 66 IT Vision 72 Kasperskey 35, 38 McAfee 34, 35 Microsoft 22, 23, 51 Mimecast 27 Netcomm 10 NextDC 67 NewLease 7, 27, Pacific Communication 35 Prescience Technology 70 Oracle 70 Outware Mobile 51 Salesforce.com 22, 46 SAP 34, 36, 38 Smile IT 13 Telstra 12 UXC 13 Veeam 67 VMware 35, 54 Westcon 27 Xero 22, 23, 47

www.crn.com.au January 2014 73

channel life rabid reseller

This year, no discounts

Here’s one New Year’s resolution that everyone can get behind: make more money

J

ust like every year, this year we made a bunch of New Year’s resolutions. It’s almost compulsory. You don’t want to be the only one at the party without any resolutions. At first, Rabid didn’t need to worry about the embarrassment on New Year’s Eve, since we were the only one at the party. We’re sure it was just a printing error on the invitation.

Themed New Year’s Eve parties are all the go these days.

What with all the concern about the environment, we thought it was quite appropriate to hold a party in a landfill site. Well, waste transfer station according to the sign. Okay, rubbish dump, actually. Never mind, we found the address for the real party eventually, although accidentally. We just wish we hadn’t worn the themed outfit to match the landfill. That got a bit whiffy after a few beers and a mild amount of what passes for dancing in Rabid’s repertoire.

Back to the resolutions. While the party was in full swing we resolved rather too loudly to stop offering dodgy discount deals with even dodgier warranties. The party went instantly silent, like one of those teen-movies where the guy admits he’s a virgin. You could

74 January 2014 www.crn.com.au

have heard a pin drop. We didn’t think it was such a big deal. The punters haven’t been falling for that old chestnut all year, so it wasn’t like it was really going to cost us anything.

Apparently, you don’t discuss discounting in a room full of resellers. Particularly while they’re partying. It’s just not done. Rabid pleads ignorance. This is the first reseller New Year’s Eve party we’ve actually attended. There’s never been anyone at the previous parties before, except Rabid. Last year the party was in a disused train tunnel, the year before it was at an abandoned quarry, before that it was on a condemned wharf.

Hardly surprising that nobody else turned up.

But this year we managed to fi nd the party by accident after the landfill mix up. It seems it was just another printing error on our invitation. Same as last year. And the year before that. You’d think they get someone else to print the invitations, but the nephew does offer to do it for free every year in the spirit of building reseller relationships. He claims it is a very popular community service and makes him feel good about giving.

So it’s not like we’ve had lots of

Apparently you don’t discuss discounting in a room full of resellers

experience on the public proclamation of New Year’s resolutions. Everyone else was resolving to quit smoking, quit drinking, quit sniffing glue and file their BAS on time. Heck, Rabid had already resolved all those things in previous years. It’s just that there were no witnesses. No matter how loudly or resolutely you resolve to do something, nobody can hear you in a disused train tunnel. Particularly when you’re on your own.

So instead, we resolved to make more money. That sort of went down okay with the other resellers – at first. But then we had to resolve not to make too much more money, as they turned out to be a bunch of socialist collectivists and they want to share the wealth. It must come from dealing with all those Chinese exporters. Maybe there are subliminal messages hidden in the invoices. Rabid doesn’t source product from China. Way too expensive. We prefer to deal with the free market thinkers in Uzbekistan.

Rabid has now resolved not to make any resolutions until next year. Well none that can be tested to determine resolvability.

Gotta go! Uzbekistani sales quotas to meet!