@flaxking said in Microsoft Resellers:

Great experience with Insight Canada account managers. Not so great experience with CDW.

Ingram Micro and Synnex were ok, RMAs always were a pita.

In the US we have to use Insight Canada for account managers. And they were terrible. We've had so many customers totally screwed because they lost their licenses, had no way to be reached. At one point, even Microsoft had no way to reach Insight!

@JaredBusch said in Why Do Vendors Use MAP Pricing?:

@Dashrender it also depends on the product.

I buy most things on the sale price, because it is not urgent. I buy clothes though, as needed, because I hate buying clothes and only buy when shit is worn through.
On the other hand, my wife buys clothes on the sales, planning ahead for seasons and when thing wear out.

And I only buy in thrift shops, where there aren't sales.

@EddieJennings said in Where IT Consultants fit between Vendors and Clients:

I don't recall saying consultant vs non-consultant, but the responses in the thread have addressed the question of who should interface with a vendor.

I feel like I should provide some context for how some vendors operate to get a better idea for the level of vendor involvement and who the vendor wants to work with.

Few things....

It depends on the vendor, and who the customer is. For instance, some vendors are 100% channel sales (Datto I think fell in here) and a customer outright can't buy them directly.

Most larger vendors DO NOT WANT to talk/sell to smaller customers directly (It's too expensive, as they pay too good of benefits, and too high of compensation to their salespeople to scale down to small accounts that because they only sell their products can't form a meaningful relationship). There typically are 4 "buckets" for products.

a. Retail sales for VERY low-value non-complicated sale items that a website can sell. These products don't require sizing assistance or are pretty simple. Think an ethernet patch cable.

b. More complicated items on smaller deals that intend to be 100% channeled in sales (You don't want this stuff sold by Amazon as the customer will likely buy the wrong SKU, or screw upsizing). Note, the vendor may offer a direct model but will often have "cannon fodder" class salespeople in this space, and generally will even charge more for going direct. A VAR is your best bet here. Think someone buying 3 servers, or 20 laptops, or a single palo alto firewall for a SMB. all services are going to be VAR partner led when possible beyond post-sales support escalations. Also in these smaller accounts it's expected that the VAR/MSP is more than likely going to know the needs potentially better than the customer does.

c. larger enterprise deals where the VAR is still involved but the vendor takes some leadership because the account is big enough to matter, or the vendor wants a strategic presence in this account. The paper may shift to being run by the vendor at the higher end of this, with a small revenue share back to the VAR who brought this deal to them for the life of this deal. Think ELA's, 100 site MLPS circuit deals etc. services might be delivered by either the partner or the vendor at this stage.

d. Direct only deals. These are sometimes called "named accounts" and the vendor will 100% run paper directly. A partner of record might get 3% of the deal if they are lucky, or be subcontracted if they are a marque support partner with tons of certifications.

Others can comment but sales teams tend to be organized around these different groups Example:

Commercial-1 Smallest accounts and people who haven't bought anything in 5 years from you. These are called "Whitespace accounts" and you basically have people trying to get a meeting with hundreds of these in a territory or verticle and seeing if they can find some gold and get people with a low priced entry solution. ALL sales will be inside teams at this scale with VAR's or MSPs type shops doing any in person meetings.

Commercial-2 Slightly larger accounts. Might have spent a few thousand, but there isn't a strategic or lucrative relationship. You might have a field team at this point but they will likely cover hundreds of accounts still.

Midsized Accounts - Still larger. They will likely have some clue who their account team is, but still rely on a VAR for most day to day stuff.

Large Enterprise - Big names you recognize. These accounts will have teams who might have only 5-10 customers. Alignment on this is going to be tied to geograhpy still more than likely.

Globals - Account teams will be in some cases 1:1, or if there is a specific industry (Say automakers, or oil gas) you might have a team in a city (like Houston) whose job is to wrangle these guys. The Cxx levels of the vendor likely have strong relationships with these accounts and for a software vendor these accounts could be spending 9 figures at a time, or for hardware companies 10.

@Dashrender said in Consultancies Advertise People; VARs Advertise Products:

@EddieJennings said in Consultancies Advertise People; VARs Advertise Products:

This may seem simplistic, but if I were in this scenario, on which side of the MSP / VAR would I stand?

A person hires me to help spec out a server for their office. I'm paid to help them determine how much RAM, storage, processors, etc. they need.

This part is clear, I'm being paid for advice; thus, MSP.

A point of clarity - advising only this is not being an MSP - you'r not managing anything (managed service provider). ITSP or Consultancy would be better terms for this portion... heck - the whole thing, including recommending a hardware vendor, because again, you're not managing anything.

True. I ought to have used those other terms.

I've worked on both as corporate IT and MSP owner. There is a place for corporate IT and a place for an MSP.

The MSP was the clear winner in small companies. Someone trying to do dual roles such as IT and accounting was generally weak in one or the other because they weren't spending enough time on one or the other to become really good at it.

On the corporate side, even if they hired lots of stuff out, they still needed an IT Manager to manage all the IT projects. They knew what was a priority for their business and managed projects accordingly.

@carnival-boy said in MSP or VAR or just avoid:

For an MSP to be truly agnostic it would either have to massive (to be able to employ both Oracle and SQL Server experts), or it is full of generalists who can support both but lack expertise in either.

That's part of the goal, or typical goals, of moving to the MSP model. They bring more scale and with scale comes agnosticism (the move towards it, but obtaining it as you pointed out.) You might not have expertise or experience with every OS out there, but even a moderately small MSP like NTG regularly supports and works with many databases. Not Oracle, which isn't a big deal as it has essentially no place in any intentional deployment, but MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, REDIS, MongoDB, SQLite, etc. all regularly supported.

MSPs are way more likely to have the desire and ability to grow support skill sets, although this can happen internally as well. But internal skill growth is costly and risky to maintain. For an MSP, skill growth increases potential customer support options. So MSPs have more incentive to consider things they've not done specifically before than internal IT departments do.

Nothing is perfect, but MSPs make agnosticism easier and more likely.

reason for this, to me, is partially induced by the amount of work/materials required in a company to get the job done.

When you start it is really close to what you do in your house, so you go to the mall and buy a router, a laptop and so... you do not think about planning, it is just another piece of HW you need, like the smartphone. You do not hire a consultant to buy a smartphone.

a SMB with no more then 10 people will need not so much, maybe just an intervention now or then, let say to change a burned router every 3/5 years, or a broken disk in a NAS. This stuff is so rare that the SMB do not hire competent people to manage it - they just buy stuff like in their own house-, therefore, the SMB has a relevant degree of ignorance on a topic.

the commercial guy in front of the SMB is (apparently) a huge source of information for the SMB, they do not need to go deeper on tech details: they can't even totally understand what the commercial is exposing.

Now you will say: hay, consultants are there for this very topic: let SMB not be fooled/deviated by bad commercial practices.

Yes, but this implies that the SMB has - at least - a bare minimum degree of knowledge about its own ignorance.

Unfortunately they have not. Everything starts with something small, let say a small 2-disk NAS. Hey it worked! now what, oh we need a small server. Hey the commercial guy has solved the problem last time, let's call him again, he will solve it!

Then you start buy stuff and stuff, in the end IT is not the core business it is just like other tools you need to make the job done. period. what matterst is if you have margins.

Here is where you start thinking about consultats. when margins are hard. and the bigger you are the harder to keep margins high. therefore you start minding about what you are doing. And consultants start here. But it is not the IT consultant. the IT consultant is at the end of the queue, first you start with company organization, with people and procedures, THEN you ask for consultancy on tools.

Smart switches are cheaper than managed switches, normally by quite a bit. And they are way easier for a small business to manage as they normally just use a web browser or a simple utility instead of making you use expensive and complex central management tools for SNMP.