Roundup: Hot Topics From Four VARBusiness 500 Roundtables

Managing Channel Conflict
One hot-button issue for any solution provider is managing channel conflict, something some vendors do much better than others.

"As a multivendor partner, we work well with some vendors, but with some of our others we're trying to find the sweet spot for trying to avoid channel conflict," said Keith Boyer, COO and CMO for Data Management Group, a solution provider in Hampton, Va.

"We're working real hard at it and trying to get the vendor to realize that we control the account as much as the vendor," said John Varel, CEO of Fusionstorm in San Francisco. "Size helps. Where we might not have gotten a return phone call from a vendor at one point, once we do $X million in sales for them, they know that if they don't get back to us, we'll call VARBusiness and complain. We want to keep our margins, and God know they want to keep theirs, so we keep an open dialogue."

Others say that while some vendors are better than others at managing channel conflict, no one has got it down perfectly.

"Even if they have [managing conflict] as a stated policy and can talk about why you should continue working with them, they've never been able to do it; I don't care who the vendor is," says Frank Mogavero, chairman of Data Systems Worldwide in Woodland Hills, Calif.

Hiring And Retaining Employees
Hiring and retaining people with the right sales and technical skills is top of mind for executives running some of the most successful solution provider companies. There's an IT skills shortage, according to the executives, and it's causing them to rethink how they staff their organizations.

"There just aren't people out there," says Richard Bocchinfuso, CTO at MTI Technology, based in Irvine, Calif. "We used to not hire young people. We used to say that we don't develop people but hire them. That has changed. We have interns this year. We want to train them and put them into the workforce."

Mike Cox, president and CEO at Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Logicalis, says the personnel situation is a bit of a revolving door; he's been hiring back salespeople who left for the competition only to find that the grass isn't any greener.

Shiv Kumar's solution to the staffing drought is to partner with other solution providers to fill in gaps in his own company's skill sets. ZSL, in Edison, N.J., specializes in business-intelligence solutions, says Kumar, the executive vice president. To be able to offer customers other services, the company has created a formal network of other VAR partners.

NEXT: Problems with hardware sales and the way enterprises do business.