Trees and bushes everywhere are telling us loud and clear: spring 2004 has arrived. Time perhaps to get rid of the dead wood, in gardens, home and work place? What is hot and what’s not in partner programmes out there, where are the bottlenecks and the opportunities are just some of the questions resellers often ask us.
Soon, CRN will be able to provide at least some of the answers, with the annual Outlook Awards. Be sure to go to the website and participate. Your contribution will be key to CRN’s insightful research and analysis.
By the way, Konica Minolta kindly pointed out to me that the company has two distributors in SA, namely Itec (formerly Konica SA) and Minolta SA. Konica Minolta, Japan confirmed their continued appointment of both of their distributors recently, when the merger between these two brands was announced. The article in last week’s Flash entitled "Minolta SA distributorship follows merger" may have created the mistaken impression that only Minolta SA is to be their distributor.
Another bit of news is that Cognos’ channel is alive and well in SA, unlike what possibly disgruntled solution providers had us believe on CRN Flash recently. Last year’s rationalisation of its channel saw the vendor reduce its reseller partners from 20-something to four. With true VARs on their side, who are Cognos certified in the BI and CPM fields, the vendor is well on the way to penetrate the local market, says Johan Cloete, business development manager at Cognos.
The company follows a hybrid go-to-market strategy, a 50/50 channel/direct split, but Cloete says Cognos is very transparent in its direct dealings with end-users, involving partners wherever possible. Clearly the solution providers I spoke to last week had some sour grapes about the relationship ending!
Finally, HP has attracted substantial negative media attention with its recent quarterly results, due to a significant shortfall in core infrastructure — especially server and storage — revenues.
But US research company Forrester believes that there is absolutely no cause for concern for users who have strategic commitments to HP as a supplier; the negative news is more probably related to internal systems problems and product transitions as HP executes its strategic shift from multiple proprietary server architectures to an Itanium-based, high-end strategy.