Round Table: The future of the PC reseller

BC: How does everybody here feel about the rise in importance of the mass merchants and the different stock keeping units (SKUs) they get?

SE: I think it causes resellers a problem when there's a machine with similar specifications, albeit less robust, in the market at a cheaper price. That does cause some grief when we are trying to justify a premium product.

MB: We don't find that to be much of an issue. They generally differentiate and I don't think we can label the vendors as ineffective when it comes to positioning retail versus business. I walk into David Jones and see stuff I have never even seen or heard of but it isn't what an IT manager is looking for.

MH: But they do buy them for home and that's the problem. Dell has realised that everybody is a home user and I think that is one thing it has done well.

DA: Let them have it. Go and buy from David Jones or Dell; I don't care because it is less stress for me later on.

MH: The best of the services the channel has to offer is a different value proposition to what is available from a manufacturer. Try and get Dell to manage your infrastructure.

DA: Dell is there at the moment and putting in a big push for that. It is going to be a threat to everybody. Dell wants to do what it is doing with desktops, notebooks, servers and storage in the services space.

MB: The other vendors are starting to do that too. A vendor was in our office yesterday trying to get feedback as to how its resellers could effectively sell more of its value-added services.

DA: That's because you didn't tell them from day one that you are an integrator. We told them straight away that this was our space and we would not be using them. They have never tried to sell their services to us. But it could be good for you to sell those services and make a margin on them rather than somebody else coming in and stealing that business away from you. We do use some vendor services for things we are not really aligned to like high-end storage. But Dell could be a big threat. There's all this talk of vendors trying to help resellers but we have to remember they are also competing against Dell.

BC: Is the channel seeing serious growth in the implementation of thin clients?

MB: It's a threat to traditional desktop PC sales but in our business we have been running a thin client network since the dawn of time. We haven't bought a PC internally in eight or nine years.

DA: We do a lot of Citrix implementations but I am not really keen on this whole thin client thing. I think it is getting a bit more airtime than it deserves - I don't think the sell through is that big. It's good for a small environment, such as a call centre of five people and a receptionist, but nobody will run their whole company on thin client technology. Not any of our customers anyway.