Is the vendors’ dream of having prepared channels utopia? Vendors have invested millions in channel practice development every year. They have invested in training, certifications, policies, etc, to make their channels more capable in their technologies. Channels, on the other hand, have also invested millions in training, people, and time, but the question is: why aren’t they ready? Why have vendors and end users pushed channels to improve?

Readiness and enablement words are frequently used to define capacity and actions to develop the channels. Both words are not precise, therefore they drive all of us to intangible expectations. Even when vendors have certification targets, it is extremely complicated to measure the channel capacity/capability because they just consider a fixed number of people certified. The subjective way to measure the channel capacity and capability, plus the 3 aspects that I will describe below make me wonder if channel readiness is utopia or not.

The first aspect against the channel readiness is the nature of the IT industry. It has been a nature of pure innovation, as any industry in the “early” stages of its life. In the past 20 years, the speed of the innovation has outpaced the channels’ ability to learn the new technologies and products. It is true that the innovation speed slowed down in the past years, and as consequence the channels had the chance to catch up with the technology. However, recently, vendors started to market the concept of architectures, which is a combination of solutions, and the pressure on channel came back again. It increased the complexity and costs of practice development significantly.

The second aspect comes from vendors’ expectations. They have expected that channels should be as knowledgeable as they are about their “own” products. Is it reasonable? Most of vendors with their products on the early stages of  “product life-cycle theory” (developed by Raymond Vernon) have developed the channels to provide post sales services because they focused their investment on R&D and Sales as the technological adoption speed was more important than the efficiency or the cost of sales. Therefore, channels became experts in installation and maintenance support. The symbiosis was doing great, and the gap between vendor expectation and channel readiness was shrinking. Then, as any other industry, the IT industry started to mature, the margins started to drop, and then the pressure on vendors to lower their cost came to the main stage. The vendors looked at the channels as a way to lower the sales costs by transfer the execution, not only the post sales services, but also pre-sales, demand generation, and sales activities. In summary, vendors who had to develop the channels on just one dimension, post-sales services, now they have to train channels in 3 additional dimensions: sales, pre-sales, and marketing. The new situation brought additional complexity and investment from both sides, again.

The third aspect comes from the end user expectation, actually, 2 expectations. The first one is pretty much aligned with the vendor expectation, in which the channels should be as specialized as the vendors are on their products, what we already agreed that is really hard. The second is in the opposite side of the first, in which end users expect the channels to integrate the full solution. Full solution means that the channels have to be trained not only on one but several vendors. Again, it brings additional cost and complexity to the channels. To make the scenario worse, vendors compete for channels’ finite investment, and then channels end up dividing their scarce training budget within vendors. In addition, end users don’t reward channels for full solution integration with the same proportion of the investment requirement to deliver it.

Although the 3 aspects sound depressing, the channel chain has grown and continue investing in developing their capacity and capability. The channels have paced their development investment in a par with their margin evolution, this way the return on investment has been satisfactory. Besides, by allowing channels to lead the sales, vendors not only lower their costs, but also let the channels the chance to position their value as systems integrators to end users. In summary, I don’t believe that channel readiness is utopia. Based on what you just read, it is a matter of expectation and investment cadence.

I guess the message here goes to the vendors and end users to review the expectations, investments, and rewards directed to channels because as the IT industry becomes more mature then more integration will be needed, and if the utility consumption model takes off, then the channels will have a prominent figure on the chain. The Industry will need stronger and better prepared channels, so take care of them.

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.