After 20 years of experience in selling IT hardware and Services, majority through channels, I decided to share with you a bit of this experience. This blog was baptized as “Channel Conscientia”. Conscientia in Latin means knowledge, however the idea is to create another vehicle to debate concepts, experiences, trends, and questions about the future of the IT Channel, primarily focused on business-to-business (B2B).

It is the inaugural article of this blog, and the theme is the symbiosis between vendors and channels to serve customers (B2B). In 1879, a German mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary, defined  symbiosis as “the living together of unlike organisms”, and this describes my vision of the relationship between vendors and channels. The nature of the IT industry forced the model to evolve beyond the traditional and theoretical sales-cost-saving-through-channel model to a stage where vendors and channels share investments and risks. During the past 2 decades, the industry vendors have invested in Research and Development (R&D) for product (hardware and software) innovation, while channels have invested in sales, market coverage, and service capability.

The synergy and dependency between the two grew so much that there are several examples where vendors depend on very few channels and channels concentrate their revenue on few or, sometimes, one vendor. The mutual dependency generates lots of trust and focus from both sides. Regardless the cause of the mutual dependency, the consequence is a positive spiral where both sides trust each other, generating more investments and initiatives together, especially in growing markets or technologies.

This could be the perfect world, couldn’t it? But it is not. There is someone missing in this equation: the customer, who pays for the solutions.

The customers have dreamed about “one-stop-shopping”, which means that they want to buy the full solution from one single entity. It is against the “perfect world” described above. Customers are used to deal with several specialized channels to compose the final solution. In addition to the technology complexity, dealing with several channels adds another layer of complexity, and cost. Nowadays, customers are looking for channels that can integrate several solutions. Moreover, the utility model described by Nicholas Carr in his book “Big Switch” is accelerating this search. The utility model is the new IT consumption model, where customers will pay for IT services as they use, like electricity.

Very few channels can provide a full solution to a customer because very few channels have the characteristics needed to offer a full IT solution, which I consider a great opportunity for channels to start investing in this direction. One of the companies who can provide a full solution today is IBM and the recent Cemex BPO deal announced in July 2012 is a good example.

In closing, I consider the current symbiotic relationship between vendors and channels fascinating, and it should be a subject for studies, however it seems to be in check. The IT industry will suffer a big change in the next 10 years, especially due to the new “utility” model. All “organisms” of this ecosystem, i.e. vendors, channels, and customers, will have to evolve to a different stage and, of course, the relationship between them will also have to change. Some logic  predictions could be customers rewarding more the multi-solution channels, Channels developing their capacity to offer multi-solution and managed services, and vendors learning to deal with multi-solution channels.

In summary, it doesn’t matter if my predictions will be right or wrong , but there is one thing will happen for sure: the change. Are you ready?

If you agree or not with me, please let me know your opinion about how the symbiosis between vendors and channels will change. If you are not in the IT industry, please contrast your reality to ours.