Solution Providers: Business Has Been ‘Unbelievable’ As Coronavirus Hit The U.S.

‘The initial surge was very, very good for us in March, but the other effect on the business is taking care of your employees, and the uncertainties of what this is really bringing to us,’ says Rick Chernick, CEO of Camera Corner Connecting Point.

Solution providers tell CRN that business has been good as companies and government entities switched to remote work and schools shifted to distance learning as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S.

Rick Chernick, CEO of Green Bay, Wis.-based Camera Corner Connecting Point, told CRN, the solution provider had a record March. Although Chernick said there’s more at work in this crisis.

“The initial surge was very, very good for us in March, but the other effect on the business is, you know, the people issue and taking care of your employees, and the uncertainties of what this is really bringing to us,” said Chernick. “So it isn’t just about sales, it’s about how do you hold everybody together and keep them positive, and trying to control the worry that they all have through this thing.”

Luis Alvarez, president and CEO of managed service provider Alvarez Technology Group, said that “our recurring revenue has continued. Most of our clients, in fact almost all of our clients, are still working in some capacity, so they’re still paying their bills, which is great.”

But the company has also seen an impact to its bottom line as clients have “deferred a lot of big projects that we had in the pipeline until later sometime.”

As for customers, Compugen President Harry Zarek, told CRN, “Most of our customers were not prepared.”

“Now, they were prepared, potentially, for a small group of employees working from home, but en masse —all of their employees working from home— not prepared,” said Zarek. “And so our sales force and our service organization has been totally preoccupied with really trying to help get customers operational.”

While sales are important, NWN President and CEO Jim Sullivan said the firm’s “number one” focus is on “employee safety [and] our customers being able to kind of get safely enabled from the office to the home.”

“But as you could imagine, the crisis is squarely around our set of offerings so we’ve seen a really big spike in demand, particularly, with the state and local agencies, and education,” he added.

“It’s been unbelievable, March because of this, we ended up selling an awful lot of equipment, as most resellers did if you were paying attention to this this thing, to your customers for the work at home model,” said Chernick. “So, the increase in sales such as monitors and laptops, and those kinds of things just went out the door faster than we could find them.”

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