Page 3 of 3
On Monday, Tech Data plans to detail two new financing relationships with Castle Pines Capital, which has an affiliation with Wells Fargo, and CIT Technology Financing Services.
"People who have been in IBM or Textron flooring have alternatives. Castle Pines is a full-service flooring company. We got notified just today that we had 11 resellers move from Textron to Castle Pines," Tillesen said. "CIT is a very aggressive and well-known end-user leasing entity with programs that really support us. They're willing to support software purchases, which in the leasing world is not that common, and managed services contracts, which is very important to us."
Manufacturers are also trying to help VARs with credit issues, Tillesen said. Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Kaspersky, Fortinet, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Lucent, SonicWall, Sony and VMware are companies now offering 60-day terms, according to Tech Data.
Of course, getting credit for a VAR is only half the battle. Securing credit for customers is also getting tricky, solution providers said. A couple months ago, Albright had a customer turned down instantly by IBM on a leasing opportunity.
"They probably didn't have the greatest credit in the world, but we do a lot of business with them and they've always paid us on time. It was a real struggle trying to get them some financing," he said.
The customer ended up drawing down on a bank line of credit "at an outrageous rate," Albright said.
Financing used to be a "no-brainer" when a sales opportunity was won, Albright said. Where conversations once focused solely on sales and designing solutions, financing is now a key component as well.
"The only challenge for a VAR was to engage IGF soon enough and to make sure what we did dovetailed into the technology plan the client had in place. The landscape changed dramatically and quickly. I equate it to nobody wants to be the last guy standing without a chair," Albright said. "And I don't see an end in sight. It sounds like we're talking about a different country, doesn't it?"
Joseph F. Kovar contributed to this article.
<< Previous
|
1
|
2
|
3
