Ted Waitt Needs A Broad Integration Channel To Find Long-Term Success
Waitt, Gateway's co-founder, chairman and CEO, has decided to take the company into the higher end of the computing market while also making it a price and innovation leader in the consumer electronics market.
Errett Kroeter, director of partner programs at Gateway, recently told CRN that Gateway's corporate strategy includes a renewed effort in the channel. The company timed that decision with the introduction of new four-way servers and entry-level storage products.
The company's initiatives at both ends of the technology market just may offer an opportunity for solution providers interested in driving into the networked home. If you take a close look at Gateway's product lineup,which runs the gamut from four-way servers, storage products and standard PCs on the high end, to home theater systems and digital cameras on the low end,you'll see that in order to be successful, these products will require integration services, something the company cannot handle on its own.
Given Gateway's strategy to open stores that show how all these products work together, Waitt clearly sees a future in which both the business world and the home environment run on connected systems.
But if the company merely focuses on innovation, it will fail, in my opinion. What it absolutely has to have in order to be successful is a channel that completes the customer experience with integration services for both businesses and consumers. None of this is easy, of course, especially for a company whose roots are in the direct selling of commodity products.
In fact, Gateway missed a huge opportunity a number of years ago when it bought ALR and then failed to leverage that company's solution provider channel across Gateway's entire product line. In the end, I place that purchase into the failed merger category.
But that was then and this is now, and Gateway has an opportunity to emerge as a truly interesting and worthwhile partner for the channel.
More importantly, in this case I'm referring to not only the business side of the solution provider channel but also the emerging channel for the home.
I'm a believer that as more technology enters the home it is going to far surpass the average consumer's ability to connect it and keep it humming. A number of solution providers that concentrate on small-business networks are already toying with entering this emerging market. Today's average "video VAR" is not equipped to deal with the networking issues surrounding the personal computer network.
Going forward, the PC is going to be positioned as the brains of the entire household,used for not only managing data but entertainment as well.
This entire market will begin to collide somewhere around 2005/2006 when Sony introduces a new PlayStation that is likely to have more computing power than many small businesses possessed a few short years ago.
But what most consumer electronics manufacturers forget is that technology comes into the home piecemeal. Trying to make all the components work together when they were all bought over a five-year or 10-year period brings with it integration issues that might not be as daunting if all the products were bought at once, and from a single manufacturer.
For Gateway to be a truly dominant player in the future, I believe it needs to spend as much energy on building integration channels at the high and low ends of the product spectrum as it does on building great products.
Make something happen. I can be reached at (516) 562-7812 or via e-mail at [email protected].