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Even if you don't sell the iPhone 5, could that drag along more accessories sales and fuel overall growth?
Here's what it will do. If I'm a consumer and I want the iPhone 5, maybe I'm going to keep my existing printer and not buy a new printer so I can use that money on an iPhone 5. People are trading off buying smartphones and accessories and maybe not trying [other IT [products]. I lookat more things on my phone now that I used to print. Maybe I need a screen cover and a case for a phone. I can spend $80 and not buy ink cartridges for my printer. That's a good tradeoff and tThat's what the mobility market is doing. It's diverting spending away from traditional IT spaces and more disposable dollars into the mobility space.
What device are you using right now?
Right now, I have the Galaxy S3 in my hand. And it's cool. We sell them and it's important to sit with customers and at least be able to speak to what's hot and what's neat about particular devices.
What other product areas are hot for you right now?
Our five initiatives that we focus on are data center, mobility, software, consumer electronics and supply chain. In the second quarter, we had successes in all those areas, speaking globally. Those continue to be five areas where we are investing. The weakest performer among those five is the consumer electronics space. That's completely understandable. Consumers are not spending right now. But there's also some [ambiguity] about is that a business device or a consumer device. There's a lot of consumer spending under the guise of business and a lot of business spending under the guise of consumer.
How are your software initiatives going with StreamOne and TDCloud?
They're beginning to take hold. We announced some new vendors in the StreamOne intiaitive that had cloud offerings that we're hosting under StreamOne now. That's the process that will unfold the next couple years. There's lots of momentum around software-as-a-service, hardware-as-a-service, infrastructure as a service, but the reality is VARs are not selling tons of it. They want access to it when it makes sense to customers. We're thoughtfully adding initiatives around StreamOne and TDCloud as biz opportunities become reality.
Are VARs not selling it because they need more education on the model or because the demand is not there yet?
It's a combination of those two things. The VAR has to transition his business model from buying licenses to selling it as a service offering. The end user has to be in the mindset that they have an application in the cloud. Those will happen with very specific areas over time. Areas like backup and recovery are perfect cloud applicatoins. The typical VAR didn't have an offering in that space anyway, other than selling another storage device and then managing it. It makes perfect sense for the VAR and for an SMB.
PUBLISHED AUG. 21, 2012
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