RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 62

By Chris Angelini

I FOUND MYSELF IN THE LOCAL BEST Buy the day after Christmas—not because I wanted to return that Step Up DVD someone had decided to give my wife (though I still do), but more out of morbid curiosity. It came as no surprise, of course, that the place was packed. Kids armed with gift cards and parents loaded down with heavy returns made navigating the store a real disaster. But as I drove home and passed a local reseller—closed the day after Christmas—it really hit home that those big shops are pulling in more and more business at the expense of VARs. I can't imagine that any of those people standing in line for the privilege of returning a video card they didn't need would have preferred that to the service they might have received down the street.

Don't get me wrong—there's certainly a place for the Best Buys and Circuit Cities out there. When I need a USB floppy drive within the hour, that's where I shop. If a small business wants to add wireless support for a couple of new laptops while I'm on-site and need a SOHO access point for the job, I'll pick it up and take the profit on service. But business customers call me over the local Best Buy because they don't want to feel like 15-year olds waiting in line to spend a gift certificate on an Xbox 360 HD DVD upgrade. They're looking for an advocate to help them get what they need done, not a salesperson trying to sell what they don't. And that's why it's time for vendors to focus on driving more business to the experts. Experts are the ones who truly add value to sales and service.

The Expert Knows Best

We were recently working on a project here at RAM building a storage server that'd be tasked with housing some high-resolution video footage. Piece by piece, the machine came together. The motherboard, dual-core processors, gigabytes of memory, and hard drives were all piled into the chassis and fired up. Everything worked perfectly and the SAS/SATA infrastructure seemed to be the perfect compromise between performance and reliability. Then Intel launched its quad-core Xeon and our eyes collectively lit up. If four cores in a dual-socket machine were good, then surely eight in the same box would be better.

Compatibility really shouldn't have been a problem. The quad-core chips came with their own active cooling solutions, yet we kept running into hard lock-ups that appeared to be heat-related. A bit of troubleshooting, several tech-support phone calls, and more than a week of downtime determined the problem to be BIOS-related. A beta file was sent out and our server board was flashed with the update. Suddenly, we couldn't even get to a Windows boot screen. The system fired up, cycled through a few error messages, and just sat there. Great. More downtime ensued, and the best our crack team of techs could manage was an eventual boot back into Windows and a subsequent crash. So much for saving money and handling things in-house.

Soon after, the system shipped out to an expert at Micro Standard, a Seattle-area distributor, who was able to get the box up and running again in just a couple of hours. When it came back in the same day, we were all blown away by how much energy had been wasted around the office. Why hadn't the system gone to an expert right off the bat? How much cumulative time had we lost by focusing our efforts elsewhere and not on doing our actual jobs? And how on Earth did he fix that thing?

The Big Picture

Businesses don't want to feel like they're standing in line waiting for your attention, regardless of whether they're medium-sized shops or one-person outfits. At the same time, many of those same businesses tend to commission service jobs or system builds and focus on how much it's going to cost. Unfortunately, getting those customers to realize that there's more to paying for expert help than just price is often impossible.

But when you take cost into consideration and not just price, the expert perspective starts looking a lot more attractive. In our situation, cost added up to lost hours of productivity and the delay of an important project. When it comes to the functionality of an SMB server, you can toss system downtime, often measurable in thousands of dollars per hour, and the cost of repairs into that equation. Taking a mission critical machine offline to upgrade it is serious business. So you can see where it makes sense to tap the expert's familiarity with the latest hardware, the best troubleshooting methodology, and the experience to know how to get out of bad situations if a BIOS flash leaves an important machine unbootable. Unfortunately, like us, small businesses are only hit with that realization after they've wasted precious time and money on the cheaper, seemingly more convenient solution and wound up in an even bigger mess than before.

The real trick, then, seems to be getting SMBs to utilize the experts right off the bat—to skip the chain store lines and perception of savings in favor of the experts who know their way around complex servers and how to most effectively get critical systems back up to speed as quickly as possible. After all, the sooner that small business starts making money again, the less downtime actually costs. You'd think that business customers would already operate along those lines—that they'd be aligning themselves with a technology expert one phone call away. Surely most do. Yet I still run into a fair share of IT managers and business owners who either tried taking tech matters into their own hands or trusted the wrong retail outlet with a complicated problem that turned out worse. The message just doesn't seem to be getting out.

The good news is that VAR-friendly vendors such as Intel already pour quite a bit of money into channel MDFs (market development funds) to drive more business. The bad news is that those efforts to promote channel sales pale in comparison to the dollars dedicated to driving the retail channel. So when it comes time to shop for an Intel Centrino notebook or an AMD 4x4 entertainment box, many customers find themselves in that Best Buy store instead of with the expert who can really help them.

Finding Expert-Oriented Business

It turns out that there are already a handful of opportunities suited to the expert that simply can't be fielded in a retail environment. Indeed, the vendors backing those opportunities are looking for ways to drive more business to the professionals with the right influence and knowledge.

Take Intel's Software Development products as a perfect example. We all take the benefits of multi-threading for granted because yesterday's server chips featured two cores and today's sport four. But there's a complex foundation of software development that goes into making servers and desktops with more than one set of execution resources run faster. Intel sells a handful of different development products designed to ease the transition from single- to multi-threaded operation. One is a compiler. Three are different performance libraries—collections of threading-aware code optimized for media functionality, engineering, and more. The Thread Checker and Thread Profiler tools validate code by maximizing execution speed and ensuring proper functionality. Finally, VTune analyzes threaded software, checking for bottlenecks and providing performance feedback.

None of those tools are available on a retail shelf. In fact, Intel works with a very select group of experts to get feedback on what is working and what isn't with regard to garnering business. In return for that close working relationship, Intel enables its expert partners—members of the Intel Premier Providers program—with higher margin opportunities. The customers who buy Intel Software Development products play a very active role in exposing the benefits of your dual- and quad-core servers. To be the expert selling those solutions also puts you in a position to provide a hardware infrastructure. You cross over from selling systems to delivering complete solutions.

Consider professional graphics as a second example. I know several engineers and architects who've bought tier-one boxes trying to save some money, only to approach me weeks later looking for more memory, the video card they should have purchased right off the bat, software they thought could be downloaded via BitTorrent, or a backup drive to preserve their plans.

Not long ago, a friend who works for Chevron was telling me how his department was getting a bunch of NVIDIA Quadro Plex 1000s for a geology project they were tackling using workstations purchased previously. The sheer power of his dual-Quadro Plex setup suggested extensive in-house qualification. And while a quick look at NVIDIA's Quadro Plex system requirements page turns up a respectable list of name brand machines, the company also makes a tremendous effort to certify several server and workstation motherboards. Stepping beyond those few tier-one boxes shows that NVIDIA is clearly looking to push more business to the experts who can put together a balanced hardware configuration and matched software environment.

Perhaps to an even greater extent, NVIDIA's SLI multi-GPU rendering technology stacks the deck in favor of experts who're able to turn a solid motherboard and pair of workstation-class graphics cards into either a super-fast single-display 3D workhorse or a quad-monitor business desktop. In either case, NVIDIA is giving experts the power to exercise their expertise in a market that was once dominated by names such as SGI, Evans and Sutherland, and Quantum 3D.

Knowledgeable VARs are similarly seeing better access to the video security market, helped along by broadband Internet, fast business networks, and reasonably priced IP cameras. You might be surprised how tough it can be to set up a remotely accessible Internet camera. And even though entry-level models from D-Link and Panasonic sell at the same local Best Buy down the street, I wouldn't want to watch a small business owner work on setting one up. As with software development and high-end graphics, video security involves considerable expertise. Setting up remote access to a networked camera, for example, requires the know-how to pass a public WAN address from your customer's DSL modem to an intermediate router. Then the camera has to be accessible from behind the router, either necessitating port forwarding or application of a DMZ. In either case, you'll need to lock the camera down somehow to prevent unauthorized access to it.

What if your customer needs four cameras monitored? Are you dealing with sufficient bandwidth to stream multiple feeds? As the job goes up in complexity, the importance of an expert scales alongside. There's plenty of room for security vendors to dedicate more effort at driving business to the experts capable of deploying security solutions.

The Expert's Touch

We learned the hard way with our video storage server build that sometimes it's better to concentrate on doing what you do best and lean on the expert when there's a problem you just can't work around. You won't find those experts at big retail shops, even though a majority of marketing dollars flow in that direction.

Getting the message out isn't the expert's job so much as it is the vendor's. Intel does an excellent job communicating with its reseller partners to figure out how to best position its software development products. Even Microsoft seems to be striving for a similar level of expert intimacy with its Small Business Specialist program. Resellers who aren't getting the support they need to bother opening up on the morning after Christmas need to lean on their vendors for help in getting the word out.

At the same time, experts should take it upon themselves to do be proactive in selling their specialties. Saving customers valuable time on server maintenance is worth money when downtime is simply not an option. Selling the preventative service to help protect those same machines is worth even more. Expert experience like that just isn't available over the counter.

Vendors need to be driving more business in the expert's direction. Small- and medium-sized organizations don't want to be spending time in line for help at Best Buy, and they shouldn't be wasting time on tech troubles best handled by a specialist. There are plenty of markets already highly serviceable by experts in their respective fields. Hopefully, 2007 will see vendors pushing harder and harder to enable opportunity for those folks.