A digital transformation has been occurring since the dawn of the internet and the push toward it isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. Every organization – no matter the size – must be prepared to compete and succeed in this digital world, according to the author of this Forbes article. This requires that value-added resellers help guide their SMB customers to “right size” enterprise technology, principles, and best practices — even if they don’t have an enterprise-sized budgets — to stay competitive.
According to Bobby Mueller, founder and CEO of Qube, making enterprise-level technology “right-sizable,” leverageable, and cost effective is one way that VARs can approach their customers.
“The ability to right-size the solutions to a specific business and leverage more scalable elements makes it easier for a VAR to create enterprise-class capabilities that are accessible and affordable to any size organization,” Mueller said. “And having the same level of capability as a much larger organization, coupled with the generally more flexible and nimble nature of smaller businesses, creates a significant advantage for small businesses. If we can help them leverage the technology that a large organization would have to have teams of people and huge budgets to accomplish, and provide them those capabilities, that provides a huge value and differentiation for them.”
Mueller says that this is in sharp contrast to the way most have approached the “infrastructure problem” for the past 50 years.
“It’s been analogous to building desktops. When putting together a solution for a customer in the past, you had to look for the right memory, hard drive, processor, motherboard, etc., and put them together. When one thing failed, we had to go and design for that and replace that. Today, if you look at the way we support desktops, we don’t build, we buy. It makes more sense to go to a provider, spec out what you need, buy it as a system, support it as a system, and then refresh it accordingly,” Mueller said.
There hasn’t been a way to do that for infrastructure until now. Surprisingly, Mueller says that the biggest challenge his company has faced in moving VARs and others to this buy vs. build methodology is getting partners to understand that the ease of doing it doesn’t take away from the true innovation it brings.
“Traditionally, the VAR/MSP consulting world has been creating value around solving complex problems, and we have found a way to engineer the complexity out of the process. Now, they can solve bigger problems for their customers, such as how to innovate around artificial intelligence or capitalize on the opportunity around IoT while properly securing customers environments,” Mueller said.
That is where the complexity should lie, not in the building of the IT configuration. Some Comstor partners see this new approach as a way to quickly and efficiently expand their deal size and reduce cost of sales, Mueller explained.
“Using a buy vs. build approach is a force multiplier for small VAR presales resources that are, typically, highly constrained. This shift in mindset allows them to start transitioning to more subscription based and managed services quickly and easily,” he explained.
“A partner can take a customer through the Qube Builder journey, and, even if they’re not used to selling subscription or service-based solutions, they can sell in that same motion while the Builder automatically maps in things that have a subscription or a recurring revenue component.”
This capability to provide optimized solutions that VARs generally wouldn’t have the knowledge or skillset to create on their own, coupled with things that are significantly easier to manage, are valuable and necessary for the SMB space. Using a Qube approach, the VAR has the opportunity to offer better, enterprise-class designs that are affordable and also easily managed by a small IT staff, a true necessity in today’s digital world.
