5 Big Bets D&H Is Making In 2018

Schwab Betting Big For D&H

D&H Distributing Co-President Dan Schwab is looking to the future as the company celebrates its 100-year anniversary.

Schwab said the distributor, which prides itself on working with solution providers of all sizes, has found the biggest bet to be cybersecurity, a topic that was featured prominently at the D&H 2018 Mid-Atlantic Summer Technology Conference, followed closely by the annuity streams created through Device as a Service.

At the conference, Schwab talked with CRN about the five big bets the century-old company is making in the last half of this year.

On Security, Network And Vulnerability Assessments

"That basically is helping our resellers identify vulnerabilities within their end users' security environments. You go to a COO of a small company and they’re going to say, ’I’ve got no IT budget. We’re not buying new computers. We’re not buying new things.’ When it comes down to a security threat, there’s no price. Whatever it costs. They have to do it right, or it puts them out of business. So how do you help resellers protect those end users? It creates business opportunities."

On Staff Augmentation

"How can we help [resellers] build out solutions so that we create a bill to materials, or design a solution on their behalf when their hands are tied. We’ve got a company that’s looking to do something more complex than it's done before. Maybe it’s a 500-person company and they need to do a wireless site survey and they need to upgrade their network and they want to change their storage solution, and the resellers maybe have not dealt with something that complex before. We will provide staff augmentation to design, develop and configure that in conjunction with our resellers, but with us doing a lot of the work, and hand it over to them."

On Device As A Service

"People have already figured out Software as a Service, through the cloud. Now where we’re really aiming is Device as a Service in small businesses. [Businesses are] used to paying on a monthly basis for their phone, for other technologies, so we think that’s a great opportunity. So they have the ability to refresh more frequently. I was just talking to someone who does 80 percent of their business in the months of July and August. They have to scale the organization up and pull back down. You don’t need those computers for the other nine months of the year. So how can you figure out how to scale your organization and pull back? How about your computing power? Same thing on bandwidth. Same thing on servers."

On Small-Business Collaboration Through Videoconferencing

"Collaboration has hit critical mass in the enterprise, but not in small businesses. So if you work at a law firm and you have a second office in another city, why are you only doing conference calls? I have an office in Canada. Every meeting I have with my Canadian team it's as if they’re sitting right next to me with collaboration, and it's so cost-effective today. Today we sell solutions for collaboration. My daughter [as part of a student leadership team] does conference calls with 12 girls all the time on her computer and it’s a technology where whoever is talking they pop up. She does videoconferencing with 12 kids around the world yet a small business doesn’t’ do that at all. It's unbelievable. It's so much more efficient. That is a big one for us that we think is a major opportunity."

On Training And Education

"There are a lot of other technologies that are all requisite in today’s world. Years ago you could be a specialist in networks, or a specialist in server technology, and it was OK. Today, you have to sell horizontally, across all the technologies. In that small-business example, [the solution provider] is the outsourced IT department. That’s where I say we can help them augment their business because they have to sell so many technologies. That end user starts asking questions about something that maybe the reseller hasn’t done before. The reseller doesn’t want that end user to go find someone else that has a specialization there. So that’s where we come in. The requirements of training have been amped up dramatically. So that’s why we’ve added four more people to our training and solutions team and all they do is spend time training resellers. So they’re not revenue-generating. Their job is to enable our resellers to sell more and more advanced solutions to meet their end users' needs."