Synnex Seeks 'One IT' System to Integrate With VARs

The "One IT" concept is being developed at the behest of the advisory council, said Kevin Murai, CEO of Synnex.

"The vision here is around the extra dab of glue that further ties our community together. If we're speaking the same language from a systems standpoint, we can work more seamlessly together," Murai told the crowd of 200-plus VARs Tuesday at Varnex Spring Conference in Orlando.

Getting there wont' be so easy, Murai admitted, as many VARs already have a wide range of technical competencies and disparate backoffice systems. But investing in a unified system could benefit the distributor-solution prvoder relationship, as well as peer-to-peer relationships between VARs, Murai said.

"[Another VAR] may have specific technical competence you don't have or operate in a city that your customer does but you don't. Before we get to the vision of trying to create [partnerships], there are some base level advantages as well," Murai said. "A lot of you are operating with disparate systems, financial systems, quoting tools, tracking pipeline [tools]. If we could tie all that together we could drive efficiency to more of you and leverage our scale and numbers to create a single ERP and hopefully save costs for you in the way you run your business."

Synnex and the Varnex council have identified demand generation, campaign trackers, pipeline trackers and sales trackers as key functionality for One IT. Synnex is exploring developing its own tools as well as utilizing third-party tools, Murai said.

"We'd like it to be a hosted solution. The analysis is underway right now," he said.

Synnex expects to have recommendations by July and then the distributor and its Varnex members can decide how to move forward.

"From a timeline standpoint, we don't want to be talking about the same thing two years from now. We want deployment by then," Murai said. "We want to communicate in a more automated, detailed, profiled way. We want to send you only the information you want. There are ways of streamlining the overall processes if you tie into our overall systems. Finally, we can provide the foundation for you to outsource some back office if we're all speaking the same language."

Synnex won't offer One IT until it can be proved to deliver benefits to VARs, Murai said.

"We're not going just to have a VAR-specifc ERP solution. We believe it will benefit all of you immediately. We have to be able to demonstrate that to move forward. This is work in process right now," he said.