Robert Sherry | 29th May 2016

Over the last decade or so, business transformation for IT resellers has been a constant. Gone are the growth opportunities in simply identifying hardware and software needs for clients, quoting, delivering and installing. To survive, traditional resellers have had to evolve their business and vendor relationships to become service providers, systems integrators, suppliers and even consumers. And this evolution is far from complete.

Even today, CompTIA research shows business transformation is taking place across three-quarters of channel organisations. While the cloud as a delivery mechanism is undoubtedly a major driver of this transformation, there are many other important factors which include:

• Declining product margins
• An urgent need to stay relevant, and
• Customer demand for different IT delivery models

In fact, these days, to anticipate clients’ needs, IT resellers must be readily equipped to deliver virtually anything as a service. Hardware, software, cloud and data, all packaged together neatly into a monthly service bundle.

Data as a Service

While providing data as a service holds so much promise, the scale is utterly immense. But to deliver a service around insights from large amounts of unstructured data, it’s just not feasible for resellers to even begin to contemplate building this service from scratch.

Instead, you must be prepared to partner with IT vendors who have already invested tens of millions of dollars in analytic and cognitive computing. Rather than building it from scratch, you need to figure out which slice of it to buy for your business to grow new revenue streams.

Partner selection is vital

So it comes down to choosing a partner. And here, brand, industry reputation and credibility come into play. Getting hitched to a vendor who fails to tick these three boxes is sure to spell doom.

But it’s far from a one-way process. Data as a service and insights derived through cognitive computing are likely to be sold as modular vendor neutral offerings for broad consumption in the new world of ‘composable business’.

These modular offerings will depend heavily on the industry solution expertise of third parties to enable this new capability to reach new clients and previously unserved markets.  Naturally, vendor partner selection and investment will follow solution providers with deep industry expertise.

This is where industry specialisation, and domain expertise are vital. Of course, how you choose your industry specialisation depends on any number of variables. But as a first step, it’s important to create a comprehensive understanding of your market, perform a SWOT analysis and segment your clients.

Domain specialisation is key

The needs of one customer segment, are so very different from another. Just like men are from Mars and women are from Venus, consider the different planet that is healthcare technology compared to the planet of retail technology.

You can’t possibly expect to have domain expertise or specialisation in every sector. To develop niche applications for verticals, you need niche understanding and expertise.

Vendors will be looking to create new markets with component solutions that leverage their technology platforms, data and insights.

So it makes sense to position your business to develop deep expertise in a particular sector’s operations, regulations and challenges.  Only by gaining an in-depth understanding of the end users’ needs and wants within their business operations and competitive framework can you truly work out exactly what the customer is trying to achieve and then develop bespoke technology solutions optimised to meet these very needs.

Selling genuine business solutions

With this niche specialisation comes a change of mindset: from selling technology solutions to solving genuine business problems.  So, having the right skills and the right people in place is critical if you’re going to provide the unique and valuable skill set that vendors seek out to reach new customers.

How to get on the right growth path

For IT resellers, the right growth path now has to involve industry specialisation and the ability to solve the most challenging of business problems which can only be realised through having a much deeper understanding of your client and their environment.

Insights (a deep and accurate understanding) are being made available through the power of cognitive computing which provides access to previously ‘unseen’ data.  As resellers look to participate in the new world of composable applications and solutions, vendor and partner selection will be key.

To achieve real competitive differentiation and move into a more specialised arena, you need to take a methodical approach to segment your customer base and identify the relationships that matter. By understanding where you have been successful in the past, you’ll be able to identify where to focus on next.