Rampage 67

Face, Meet Palm

Most of the time, being a channel reseller is a rewarding gig. I enjoy helping SMBs work smarter using the latest technology. Those are the customers who really appreciate your work. By making money, you’re helping someone else make more as well. But I’d be lying if I said the job was all sugar cubes and roses.

Between the bad habits of vendors and simple misinformation, resellers spend a lot of their time setting the record straight rather than educating, which leads to the first of three frustrations that really get me worked up: paper launches. I understand that vendors want to look competitive and are under pressure to deliver product on time. However, announcing early and shipping months later leads to nothing but confusion. Paper launches used to be a big problem in the graphics business, where six month release schedules kept ATI and NVIDIA in lock-step with each other. One little manufacturing slip-up and a card would ship six months late, even after being announced.

AMD’s recent Radeon HD 2000-series launch rode the line. On one hand, AMD demonstrated a lot of restraint by holding off on its announcement until the Radeon HD 2900 was ready to rock. On the other, the HD 2600 and HD 2400 cards were put on hold, supposedly until late June. Even now, your customers know all about the two mainstream families from online reviews, though the cards are only just now starting to ship.

Missing in Action?
AMD announced the very-attractive Radeon 2600-series more than a month ago, promising availability late-June. We're still waiting.

AMD will likely face a similar situation with its next-generation server chip, code named Barcelona, later this year. Representatives have already conveyed a plan to dribble off information about the chip slowly, building hype a la iPhone. Hopefully the company’s Q3 aspirations don’t come to a head with rumors of manufacturing delays, especially after resellers pump up the channel for availability in 2007.

Even if Barcelona does ship on time, right next to Intel’s first 45nm Xeons, resellers will have to face my second pet peeve: the preconceived notion that a tier-one server somehow offers more value than a whitebox system. This is one I hear all of the time, from large and small business owners alike. I’ll go in to meet up with a customer interested in an SBS-based network and start laying out the options. Invariably, at some point, the customer will jump in with, “We’d really like to go with a Dell box,” or “HP has been good to us in the past.” Have they really? Maybe you’ve had better luck than I, but between failed hard drives, bad storage controllers, and daft technical support, I’d generally argue the opposite if I were sitting down at a table to talk shop with friends.

What can the reseller do to change minds? I’ve found that there’s not much you can do, unfortunately. It’s like trying to sell an AMD box into an Intel-only shop. You can maintain a relationship with the customer, demonstrate your quality with desktops or whitebooks, and continue harping on the flexibility offered by barebones storage servers like Intel’s SSR212MC2 and configurable UIO boxes from Supermicro. Many of those platforms are validated with certain hardware configurations, yielding the same R&D benefits resellers think they’re getting from tier ones.

Coming Soon, We Hope
AMD is already talking up its quad-core, server-oriented Barcelona architecture. We're to expect a launch later this year, though it remains to be seen whether there will be anything new to talk about by then.

When it comes to educating SMBs, resellers are the ones who explain the virtues of quad-core over dual, when 64-bit comes in useful, and reasons to go with a SAS storage controller, even in a SATA box. Never before has a Dell or HP representative explained why I should pay more for a particular server upgrade. If only I could show those business owners the light.

Of course, it’d be much easier to demonstrate channel value if it were easier to make money building whitebooks. There’s plenty of support for custom-built notebooks. Intel’s CBB initiative within the VBI program simplifies getting your hands on standardized components that are easy to inventory. There are also plenty of whitebook shells available. But when companies like Best Buy announce that they had a bad quarter because they sold too many notebooks, price pressure is clearly a problem. How are you supposed to compete?

Now there seems to be an issue getting new whitebooks out in the same timeframe as the tier ones. Intel recently took the wraps off of its latest Centrino revision, accompanied by announcements from all of the big names. Some came with Turbo Memory, others didn’t. Integrated and discrete graphics were also represented. But when I went to start calling the usual suspects to track down the whitebook shells I'd use to compete, I was surprised to learn they weren’t ready yet. ETA? We’re not sure. Should be soon. So not only am I unable to build a price-competitive platform, I’m also forced to go up against mobile 965-based machines using Intel’s aging 945 chipset.

Yes, being a reseller is rewarding. The job isn’t without its frustrations, though.