I’ve been thinking of writing this blog now for a while, but wondering “am I going to ruffle any feathers?”, well maybe I’m in the feather ruffling mood today.
It continues to amaze me the dramatic difference in channel partners (ITSPs – VARs, MSPs, SIs etc) inside North America (NA) vs outside NA (especially in the UK, Scandinavia, South Africa and Australia as examples). Seems to me that many ITSPs outside NA are embracing cloud and adjusting their business models, vs. ITSPs inside NA. I see it every day working with ITSPs around the world. The ITSPs outside NA are more eager to build their cloud business and are willing to put in the hard work to do so, and the ITSPs inside NA are more hesitant and skeptical. Why is this you ask? Here’s my 2 cents worth,To understand why, you need to look at how the IT world started and grew.
From day one virtually all NA based tech vendors (including the start-up’s I’ve done) have started their business selling direct in NA and “eventually” adding ITSPs to supplement their growth and provide services etc to clients. But by and large the tech vendor was mainly direct sales focused. On the other hand, outside NA the tech vendor would put a guy like me on a plane to “anywhere outside NA” and say “don’t come back without signed partner agreements”. So off I would go, finding, recruiting, signing and ramping partners – like a franchise model where I was the franschisor and the partner was the franchisee. I would then go back every 90-days or so to provide training, visits clients, review their pipe, get them drunk, beat them up a bit and say “see ya, I’ll be back in a few months”. What the outside NA partner needed to do was “be self sufficient and build a business on their own” – and they did!!! they had no choice!!! I did the exact same thing providing RMM platforms to VARs to become MSPs and the partners outside NA made that shift much quicker, and I’m now seeing that with MSPs etc outside NA making the shift to cloud – why? because they accept that they need to evolve and they’ve made the shift before.
