www.snwonline.com/plan/vars_01-09-06.asp?article_id=653 -
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Published on: 1/9/2006
Last Visited: 10/10/2007
"At least a third of the opportunities we get today are for server or storage consolidation," says Mark Darlington, chief operating officer of Trilogy Solutions LLC, a VAR in Cranberry, N.J. Adds Mark Gonzalez, vice president of enterprise storage and server sales for the Americas at HP, "Customers are looking for people who can help them navigate this mine field of storage and server consolidation."
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The value that a reseller should bring to the table, Gonzalez says, "is taking risk out of the equation."The more a partner knows about how a customer runs their business, and the specific workings of their applications and storage infrastructure, the more valuable the VAR will be and the higher a margin they can earn."With complexity comes margins," says Gonzalez , but only for VARs who can help customers through that complexity.
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Gonzalez says that rather than being seduced by the size of the hardware sale involved in storage consolidation, VARs should concentrate the software and services that probably deliver most of the profit.
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Among the more complex areas where resellers can earn higher margins, says Gonzalez, are regulatory compliance, including data replication, disaster recovery and data migration.
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Gonzalez suggests resellers use pre-bundled and pre-configured product bundles wherever possible."One of the things that eats up margin is mis-configuring things," he says.