How To Mind The Gap

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It all came together like a big product launch should: The splashy event, the big announcement and the aggressive plans by a vendor to roll out the new technology to a market that was willing and eager.

And then a funny thing happened on the way to the customer: The vendor delayed shipment of the product at the last minute and left tens of thousands of channel partners--and their customers--in the lurch. Or, maybe the product was a monumental disappointment and VARs were left to do damage control with unhappy customers.

VARBusiness spoke with solution providers about these all-too-common scenarios in the wake of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s stumbling rollout of its first quad-core server processor, Barcelona. Some basic themes from successful, nimble VARs began to emerge, painting a picture of how they are able to avoid most supply-chain shortages and can even turn delays and disappointing product rollouts to their advantage. Here are four of their rules to live by:

Keep The Lines Of Communication Open
Sometimes a product comes along that's so highly anticipated and so integral to a VAR or custom system builder's planning that prerelease deals are struck with customers and any holdups could have a devastating effect on business. That was the case with Barcelona and AMD.

Already delayed by months before its much-heralded launch last September, Barcelona had even more difficulty in store. To the dismay of AMD partners with preorders lined up--not to mention the chagrin of the chip maker itself--the new quad-core Opterons had a glitch that made them effectively useless to all but a few very specialized system builders. And unlike other commodity components made by multiple vendors, quad-core Opteron CPUs are uniquely suited for specific server configurations such as memory-intensive data center workloads. High end stuff, in other words.

This meant that system builders like Arlington Heights, Ill.-based Ace Computers--which had extensive plans with customers for Barcelona installations--were essentially up the creek without a paddle for the last half of 2007 and into the new year. In that sort of situation, you just have to keep talking to both your customers and the vendor, said Ace Computers vice president John Samborski. Keep everybody informed on progress in getting the problem fixed and the product rolled out.

The silver lining in this case is that AMD is ahead of its initial late-first quarter 2008 projection for a fix of Barcelona, according to a source at the chip maker. Meanwhile, his dialogue with the vendor leads Samborski to believe that AMD will ease some of the pain felt by partners like Ace Computers due to the quad-core delays.

"They basically provided us with sample products and they will provide the corrected products for [our Barcelona] customers, so it's nice that we don't have to put out the money for that. They're doing a very good job of taking care of us in a bad situation," Samborski said. "They're doing exactly what Intel [Corp.] did with the Pentium. It was a major black eye for Intel originally, but everybody came to trust Intel after it was all said and done," he said, referring to the 1994 discovery of a major floating point division glitch on Intel's Pentium P5 family of processors.

Next: Turn Setbacks To Your Advantage

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