SHI Races to Shield Customers From Soaring Memory Costs

“It’s important for customers to figure out who can help them identify different options like financing and pre-buys,” says SHI Senior Vice President of Sales and Solutions Kapil Bansal. “There is a whole motion around this that a lot of customers are not realizing yet. It is just going to get worse and worse.”

The prominent alert, which sits at the top of the SHI website, warns of the unprecedented memory shortage which has sent prices soaring, slamming customer’s IT budgets.

“Supply chain constraints: OEM prices and lead times will rise as demand increases across the storage and memory sectors,” reads the missive. “Act today to avoid delays.”

Avoid delays indeed. SHI, the $16 billion solution provider powerhouse, No. 12 on the CRN SP500, is stepping up with pro-active consulting and a variety of offerings to help customers sidestep price increases and shipment delays.

“Right now we have the warehousing space and we have the financing solutions,” said SHI Senior Vice President of Sales and Solutions Kapil Bansal in an interview with CRN. “There is a window right now to be able to go in and offer customers the opportunity to pre-buy and not get stuck with these increasing prices every quarter which is what is expected to happen.”

SHI’s ability to provide pre-buys, warehousing, financing and the ability to source across OEMs is helping customers navigate what is an unprecedented supply chain crisis.

“SHI’s goal has always been to drive as much value for our customers as we can,” said SHI Senior Director of Data Center and Business Management Operations Ryan Hotchkin. “This is a situation in which we need to be able to consultatively help them navigate through this. We are lucky we get a lot of this information first from the partners and the industry analysts so we can help walk them through it. Because we have so much experience dealing with similar situations like when we went through this on the device side during COVID we can extrapolate what this means and the best way to address it. We have been having a lot of success navigating this with our customers because of that.”

Bansal said the SHI response to the crisis comes with memory prices rising at a 20-25 percent clip each quarter.

“This is very, very impactful for customers right now,” Bansal said. “A lot of the larger customers have taken advantage of this over the last month or two. A lot of others are in sticker shock or trying to figure out if it’s real or not or shopping around to see if it is. I expect more customers will look at what we are offering with this over the coming months.”

Bansal said during the COVID pandemic in 2020 there were extended lead times for products but nothing like the price increases the industry is seeing now.

Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan said recently that he expects no relief until 2028 because of the exorbitant demand for memory in the wake of the AI buildout.

“It’s important for customers to figure out who can help them identify different options like financing and pre-buys,” Bansal said. “There is a whole motion around this that a lot of customers are not realizing yet. It is just going to get worse and worse.”

Bansal said Dell Technologies – the $110 billion storage and PC behemoth which prides itself on its supply chain – has helped with both shipment schedules and locking in pricing for customers so deals can be finalized.

“That has helped us,” he said. “When we go to the customer we have to make assumptions on how long we will have to hold the inventory for and the customers’ drawdown schedule. We’ve locked down a couple of very large opportunities with customers with Dell because we have been able to work this together.”