D&H Canada is offering value-added resellers (VARs) a number of white-labelled offerings to help them move towards a services model, the distributor announced recently.
“VARs have told us that they are having trouble changing,” Roy Rivers, vice-president of sales for D&H Canada told CDN, referring to the shift to a services portfolio. “It’s not that they don’t desire to do it, but there’s a cost for investment. Even the ones that have done this, they want to do more.”
Under the Professional Services offerings, the distributor will offer white labelled install and configure services for most tier one vendor solutions in the marketplace, while the Managed Services arm of the program will provide VARs with a white labelled remote monitoring offering that allows them to manage clientele networks on an ongoing basis.
D&H reached out to more than 100 of its partners in recent months for general feedback, according to Christopher Ralston, director of vendor management. Most of that feedback included requests for white-labelled offerings that could help them tap into a services model quickly. The company then created the new offerings based on a similar structure that’s already been in place in the U.S.
“Small to medium-sized VARs want to sell as much technology as they can to their existing client base. But if they were to go out and hire a technical resource themselves they would have to skill-up that resources across many different technical disciplines. And that’s very difficult. Most of them can only afford one or two technical people, but their customers often have a wide number of technologies in place, so it would be hard for that VAR to train one or two people on all of them,” said Ralston.
The services will be sold like a standard product on the distributor’s line card. Rivers also emphasized that these offerings are meant to build out existing capabilities, not compete against them.
