Mid-range Servers

• Back to the future: New opportunities in the mid-range server market
• Addressing the skills shortage
• In search of the Holy Grail: Partnering with software developers
• The more things change, the more they stay the same
• Turning competition into cooperation

Turning competition into cooperation

Although most resellers have historically been extremely wary of partnering with their competitors, the trend towards specialisation is leading to increased acceptance. While working with your peers does have its risks, it can also be very rewarding if you get it right.

Computer Merchants gets about 20 per cent of its business from partner referrals. Director, Mark Loparow, said the key to successfully building this business has been aligning itself to non-competitive partners.

"We are an infrastructure player so we have been careful to partner with other resellers that complement our business rather than competing against it," he said.

"That means both parties can benefit from an open relationship where we refer our clients to each other."

It's all about building trust, according to Service Elements sales director, Mark Johnston, who said word usually spread quickly if somebody was opportunistic and burned another partner. His company has a lot of Tivoli skills and is often connected to other IBM resellers through Avnet.

"A smaller partner might come across a storage management opportunity they don't know how to sell," he said. "If they don't know how to sell it, they have even less chance of implementing it."

Frontline Systems founder, Steve Murphy, said partnering with other resellers had worked well for him. As his company has grown, he has formed relationships with other partners that have been expanding their businesses and built trust levels over the years.

As a value-added distributor, Avnet has always encouraged resellers to work together but national marketing manager, Michael Costigan, has seen an escalation in activity during the past 12-18 months.

The distributor's Ai collective regularly brings partners together to talk about how they can work partner on System i solutions.

"It's up to us to facilitate some of these relationships by getting them in a room together. It is almost like a speed-dating concept," he said.