Economic Meltdown Means Huge Opportunity For Solution Providers

While the growing economic debacle exposes the fragility of the world's financial systems it also highlights the strength of the channel. We've already experienced our Armageddon. The Y2K ruse, followed quickly by the bursting dot.com bubble, hit the channel and the IT sector much the way the housing/credit/financial system meltdown is now impacting all sectors of the global economy.

What the IT crash at the millennium's turn taught us is that customers no longer are willing to buy technology for technology's sake. Instead they want to leverage technology to solve business problems, and they want a quick and demonstrable return on their IT investment.

Those tenets are what the solution provider channel has operated on for the past decade. What has emerged over that time is an army of business people that are the trusted IT advisors to their customers. The best way to manage through this latest economic crisis is for solution providers to call in the markers piled up over the past 10 years.

The time is now for the trusted solution provider to advise his or her customers on their IT and business future. Solution providers I've spoken to in recent weeks are doing just that. They are sitting down and having frank discussion with each and every one of their customers. And because of the scope and the depth of the economic crisis the discussions aren't confined to just IT. Most solution providers have dodged the credit crunch because distributors, vendor financing units, and independent finance companies continue to provide needed capital to the channel. But solution provider customers haven't been so lucky.

Smart solution providers now lead with a credit and financing when talking to customers. Slow pay on accounts receivable are starting to impact solution providers. The frank talks about financing can head off many problems especially when solution providers start bringing leasing options into the mix.

Solution providers too say customers are now receptive to hearing about managed services and green technology. Managed services sales in the past have been slow to take off especially among smaller business that don't fully understand or aren't ready to embrace the concept. But they sure are ready and receptive now.

Managed services make perfect sense to customers that have been forced to lay off people. And the benefits of managed services become crystal clear to customers determined to use IT as a competitive weapon but reluctant to invest in new infrastructure.

And green isn't a feel-good-concept any more; it's a save-money business decision. Solution providers now realize that green means instant and often dramatic savings on energy costs. Solution providers say pointing out the energy and infrastructure savings from consolidation and virtualization is helping to accelerate adoption. Thin clients, new energy-efficient processors and blade servers, PCs and storage are energy efficient technologies customers want to hear about.

Right now solution providers are having all of these discussions with their customers. They are consulting. They are selling. They are helping businesses gain a competitive edge through prudent and strategic deployment of IT business solutions. In short, the channel is doing what it has always done: exert itself as the trusted IT advisor to companies large and small. These economic times represent a huge opportunity for solution providers to solidify this relationship with their customers and they are taking advantage of the situation.

Vendors too should heed the call. Now is the time to have open and frank discussion with your best customer: the channel. Those that take the current economic crisis as an opportunity to cement better relationships with solution providers will survive this mess. Those that view the channel as unnecessary overhead and prune back their commitments to solution providers are in for a very unpleasant surprise.