CRN Exclusive: D&H Launches Effort To Help Partners Push 'Modern' Office Environments

D&H Distributing is teaching its partners how to build more modern, attractive and technologically flexible office environments for their customers to help them attract new talent.

Small and mid-sized businesses are competing to attract new employees, specifically millennials – those born generally between the early 1980s and the early 2000s -- who favor work environments that emphasize collaboration and accommodate remote-access workers, according to company executives.

That's why the Harrisburg, Pa.-based distributor is launching an initiative to provide partners with information on how to build those environments, which their clients can use as recruiting tools, company officials said.

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The technology the distributor is pushing as part of this initiative -- which includes mobile devices and hybrid cloud platform solutions like Office 365 and Microsoft Azure -- are already among its offerings.

The information from D&H includes, for example, how to design an office that includes what it calls "huddle spaces" -- modern work areas similar to those used by study groups on a college campus – rather than, say, a company boardroom. The huddle spaces would include such furnishings as couches, a display screen and other technology.

Although D&H acknowledged the trend in office design, it was partners who drove the distributor to provide the teaching tools, said Peter DiMarco, the company's vice president of VAR sales.

Those tools include guidance and product information from a D&H web page, webinars, live demonstrations of integrated technologies and a customized marketing brochure that partners can show their clients.

Jon Allen, the owner of Proponent IT, a D&H partner based in Ogden, Utah, says D&H has always been focused on partners, and the resources it offers are a reason he does a lot of business through the distributor.

’They understand that helping us helps them,’ he said.

Small businesses looking to create attractive environments with technology need a combination of new offerings that support seamless mobility and hybrid cloud protocols like cloud-based backup and storage, with cloud-based printing and networking, according to DiMarco.

The initiative, which D&H calls the Modern Office Business Solution, is aimed, in part, at engaging millennials who increasingly access their work remotely and utilize collaborative workspaces instead of being ’tied to a cube or desk,’ DiMarco said.

Many of D&H’s vendor partners, he added, including Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, Dell and Acer are releasing "good-looking and sleek" products that help create a modern office environment.

However, many smaller channel partners have run into two problems in trying to integrate new technologies into a modern office environment, which provides an opening for D&H, he said.

The first problem is that SMB partners don't get much ’face-time’ with top-tier vendors to learn about the products.

The second is that smaller solution providers have difficulty conceptualizing a ’big picture,’ and building solutions with ’an overall business environment in mind that embraces collaboration and creativity’ he said.

Because of that, he said, D&H is pushing harder to provide resources to its partners.

The company will host a webinar as part of the initiative on July 21 and the SMB blueprints page is available to D&H partners via its website.

And with the company’s new Modern Office Business Solutions display, which includes a live, full-scale model of modern office solutions that D&H will set up at its trade shows, partners can view the different products working in tandem and envision how solutions fit together to create a ’modern office.’ D&H debuted the display at its Mid-Atlantic show last month.

’Our Modern Office exhibit provided concrete examples of how this strategy can be applied in real-world environments, what products are most appropriate, and how they create a more admirable work environment,’ DiMarco said in a statement.

He said D&H's expanded emphasis on partner education within the last year has helped the company grow.

In a previous interview with CRN, D&H Co-President Michael Schwab said reseller partners increased the amount of business they did with his company during its most recently completed fiscal year by 21 percent over the company’s 2015 fiscal year.

’We want VARs to think in a new way, building solutions with an overall business environment in mind that embraces collaboration and creativity," DiMarco added in the statement. "We believe this strategy has considerable revenue potential for resellers.’

That hasn't been lost on Allen, of Proponent IT.

’Over the last year or so, D&H has kicked it up a notch to give us more resources to increase business, … I’ve been impressed,’ he said.