* Vendors eyeing small and midsize businesses
In the past three newsletters, I have pointed out several things we can expect to see more of in the New Year. My list included tiered storage; a greater attention to the need for accurate fault analysis; the looming battle between Fibre Channel and iSCSI for the hearts and minds of storage-area networking lovers everywhere; grids; the reemergence of a new breed of storage service providers (SSP); and the importance of low-cost alternative disk drives (SATA today, FC-SATA next year). This time we’ll look less at products and technologies and focus more on a market and how it will be addressed.
Towards the end of last year, large vendors began to ratchet up their interest in the small-and-midsize-business space. Unfortunately, the large vendors have very little history of dealing with this segment successfully, and have left that space to Microsoft on the one hand and to a plethora of small providers on the other.
It’s not that the big guys aren’t trying. Some have tweaked existing products and pricing strategies to make them more palatable to SMB buyers (CA, for example, has done an excellent job of shrinking its enterprise storage products into a very nice mix of SMB-sized offerings), while other companies have gone the acquisition route, acquiring existing SMB vendors as a way of gaining market entry.
Unfortunately, none of the larger companies defines the SMB markets (the more observant of you will note that I use that word in the plural) with much precision, and consequently they have all met with only middling success at best in terms of market penetration. They have yet to realize that while a rose may be a rose, SMB may be any of a number of different things.
There’s gold in those SMB hills though, and while the vendors may not be too accurate with their approach to SMB, the reseller channel knows the SMB geography better than anyone. And the large vendors really aren’t stupid. As a consequence, for the coming year at least, storage resellers are likely to enjoy a significant surge in business and in the support they get from their vendors.
Look for the large vendors to pay an increasing amount of attention to their channels, with the result that, more than ever before, they will be on the lookout to pick up great resellers. After all, resellers know the various SMB spaces best, and good ones are like gold – actually, in terms of business, good resellers are gold. Expect the large vendors to refresh their channel strategies, searching for the right partners to help them gain entrée into what is going to be the liveliest segment of the storage market for the rest of the decade.
I talk with many of my vendor clients about channel strategies, and believe me they are excited about the prospects that SMB offers. Hopefully, amid all this excitement they will do some listening to their resellers before they begin designing programs for them. But who knows?
If you work for a reseller, let the world know where your expertise lies, buff up that Web site, and get the word out that you are available for talks with vendors that might care to offer some high-margin opportunities. If you are a member of one of the SMB market segments, start to look around for vendors that will be seriously upgrading the offerings they have for you. And if you are a vendor and are dissatisfied with your market penetration so far, make like you are swimming at summer camp – buddy-up, guys!
