RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 63

By William Van Winkle

HERE, HAVE A SEAT ON THE COUCH. Thanks, it is a nice stack of electronics. Of course, most people wouldn't have this much. Maybe a quarter-stack. Most buyers only try to do a few things, but I'm here to try and show you everything.

The fireplace? Yeah, that's digital fire on a 32" LCD screen with some carpentry to spruce it up. Cool, huh? Now, watch this. See that Philips Pronto remote control on the coffee table? No, not the six or seven in the basket, all those remotes you used to need. Just the one remote there. Grab it, tap the Movie tab on its touchscreen, and hit Play Batman Begins. Now, look around. See the lights dim and the blinds close? The NEC high-def digital projector above us there just turned on and is warming up while the display screen drops down over yonder.

Now, look on the electronics rack. See the DVD changer spinning around and loading Batman? You probably expected that. But how about this? Exactly. That's Vista's Media Center interface on the screen. We've now got Batman queued up to run—just hit the Play button on the Pronto. But we've programmed the system to give you this one chance to bounce over and check your email, look up a Web site, or whatever before starting the movie. The Microsoft wireless keyboard is under the table there. Maybe we should hit PizzaShack.com and order in—just kidding.

Oh, and while you can't see it, the room temperature is automatically increasing two degrees to make us more comfortable during the movie. No need to worry about intruders, either. There are multiple surveillance cameras on the network—behind the walls, this place is crawling with Cisco, Buffalo, and Belkin gear—and if any of the cameras detects motion outside this room, we've programmed them to interrupt the movie and switch to live viewing of the detected area. No, seriously. It's not that difficult. Let's pull out some of this equipment, and I'll show you how it's done.

SHARING THE DREAM

This spin through Digital Dreamland is real enough. But short of investing gobs of money in CEDIA (www.cedia.org) training, tying up a small mountain of inventory, and building your own showroom, the place you're most likely to experience such wonders is Ingram Micro's Solution Center. In fact, there are two Solution Centers, one on the East Coast in Buffalo, NY, and the other on the West Coast in Santa Ana, CA. Both showcase more than $10 million of equipment spread collectively over 5,400 square feet (once the Buffalo facility remodel is finished). The West Coast Solution Center boasts the most current digital home setup, but the facilities aren't just about souped up home theaters. With partners including Axis Communications, Citrix, HP, IBM, Oracle, and Polycom, you can see that the digital home is only one facet of a Solution Center. Ingram's objective is to make these facilities a showcase for solution providers catering to high-end homes as well as businesses of any size.

"When we do a tour," says Fran Murello, senior technical manager, Ingram Micro Solution Center, "we'll go through and talk about all the great things in here. They'll see millions of dollars of equipment—racks from all the big players out there. And at the end, they usually get a little quiet, and I think to myself, ‘I must have gone too deep technically or run on too long and killed ‘em.' But usually they come back and say, ‘You've given me about 50 different ideas on how I can use this place and help grow my business.' This is all about helping these guys grow. If they do that, then they'll buy more from Ingram Micro. But we want to help them arrive at a better solution, or something they didn't even think was possible, before they came here."

We spend a fair amount of time talking about reseller education, training, and sales tools here at RAM, and, as you undoubtedly know, good resources are hard to come by. Everybody offers Web training, white papers, and so on. Vendors like such vehicles because they have broad reach and relatively low cost. But with broad reach often comes lack of depth. Larger manufacturers sometimes set up demonstration rooms to showcase their products, but the problem is that such environments only showcase their products. You wouldn't trust an Intel demonstration studio to show you the best way to do enterprise switches any more than you'd trust Cisco to show you the best way to build eight-way servers. But if you went to a showroom wanting to learn about best of breed server technologies, you'd definitely want to see both Intel and Cisco there doing what they do best, not necessarily technologies in which they have little to no deep expertise.

This is why Ingram's Solution Centers are such a big deal. There are few opportunities anywhere in which resellers can be immersed in multi-vendor solutions.

Welcome to Ingram's Solution Center. You’ll be hard pressed to find a place more densely packed with cutting-edge technology solutions you can immediately take to market.

After all, it's one thing to hear about a hot, new NAS product, but it's something else entirely to see that NAS box in context within a workgroup and remote access environment combined with other devices like digital send-enabled multi-function printers. Looking at the product literature or Web training on a NAS box, the thought of teaming it with a modern MFP might never have even entered your mind, but this is a far more persuasive solution for a small company or branch office than a stand-alone storage device, never mind being a more lucrative sale. Ingram engineers and sales staff have poured years of thought into making their two Solution Centers as dense with such solutions as possible.

"Solution centers from vendors like Cisco and HP are very nice, complete with a nice executive wrapper around them," notes Murello. "Typically you go there and it's like, ‘This is the demo for Voice-over-IP. Now, move to the left and you'll see the security demo.' It's like being in a museum. We're like being in Monster Garage. Somebody will say, ‘I'd like to see this server run with Kingston memory instead of HP under my application.' OK, let's pull it out, take the cover off, and set it up. Let's get the memory, give me the application, and we'll watch it first on one, then the other. Now, most people just show up wanting to see features and benefits, but we can do different things like this because we're vendor-agnostic. We're just here to help facilitate what your customer needs."

Selling From the Resource Center

Ingram's Santa Ana Solution Center opened in 2001, but, perhaps slowed by the recession, the Buffalo site didn't debut until 2005. The two locations working together, however, often create some persuasive synergies. With both centers tied together via T1 lines, engineers could build examples of things like a secondary location used for disaster recovery.

The cross-continent network is currently being upgraded to accommodate newer technologies from companies like Microsoft, such as Windows Vista, the Office platform, Live Communications Server, and SharePoint Portal Server. You can't exactly build a persuasive case for such things by showing a client two routers on a desk connected by a crossover cable and suggesting that they engage their imaginations. Instead, Ingram engineers in Buffalo can show customers their SharePoint Portal Server live in Santa Ana. The benefits in credibility from a real-world presentation are huge, plus the proof of concept will help avert many of the technical conflicts encountered during installation at the client's site(s).

New solutions mean new learning curves. Fortunately, Ingram's Solution Centers have training facilities to get you and even your clients up to speed quickly.

Murello notes that it's common for solution providers to bring in clients. Many major cities are within a one-hour flight time from the Solution Centers, and if Ingram engineers have sufficient notice, they're happy to tweak the environments to fit an end-user's prospective needs. This even includes turning around systems or peeling away a wall, for example, to demonstrate good versus bad installation points. Murello also encourages resellers to consider the entire facility as a whole and not go looking strictly for "home" or "business" ideas. Many digital home concepts (think projectors, large LCDs, and wireless peripherals) can be applied in corporate boardrooms, and several of the SMB technologies can be applied to residences. A gated community developer might want to explore a centrally managed outdoor IP camera deployment and see how it would work. You might be hard pressed to demonstrate this on your own, but Ingram's Solution Centers could make it happen.

Both Centers are equipped with training rooms resellers can use to get briefed on solutions or to assist in educating their customers. For some it may be daunting to see rows of tables outfitted with Cisco phones, piles of display equipment, and a head-spinning array of high-end systems from some of the biggest names in enterprise computing. But the Solution Centers are made for resellers of all sizes. Murello says he gets a lot of traffic from solution providers who sell well under $1 million annually. This group is in part responsible for the 1,000-square-foot addition under way in Buffalo, most of which will focus on SOHO and home theater/automation configurations.

The leading goal of this Ingram resource is to bring new technologies and solution sets out from the unknown and to a place inside the reseller's comfort zone. Murello wants to take you from "I don't do this" to "I've seen it; now I can do it." This is what it will take to propel your business into the future and keep the channel thriving.

"A lot of people just need a helping hand to get past the beginning uncertainties," he says. "I can show you enough to get you to fish, then you can go feed yourself."