The Long Term View

When was the last time you sold a product knowing what it was going to be used for? Certainly at a Distribution level until recently the answer would have been not often.  At a Reseller level you most likely had visibility of the immediate opportunity to bolster your quarterly revenue but little more than this if the skill sets for the entire opportunity required were out of your scope. 

Distribution is traditionally a Near Term Revenue (NTR) business; put simply it moves a box from point A to point B, and by doing this successfully it gains repeat business. 

Solution provisioning traditionally struggles to deliver against NTR and are often project based which places them into the Long Term Revenue (LTR) category.  This is one of the defining differences about Azlan; by recognising the long term view and enabling solution delivery for our Resellers we are witnessing growth at an unprecedented rate.

One of the key routes to delivering a successful LTR model is to mimic the Vendor structures and the technology pathways that already exist.

Taking Cisco as a primary example, up until recently Cisco; despite having a successful UC proposition had a very diverse and in some cases isolated delivery model for their products. This could be seen in their marketing, core products and right down to their service delivery processes.

Ignoring the irony of isolated products that formed a UC proposition; it created challenges for the end users who would find wildly different interfaces depending on what they wished to achieve.

Fast forward to the present day and Cisco are nearly complete in bringing together the many different solutions that have been developed or acquired over the recent years. To that end their core UC proposition can now be offered with a single end user interface and a vastly simplified back-end as well.

So what does this mean for Cisco and how does this transpose onto Azlan?  Well in the first instance it signalled the beginning of a long journey that saw Cisco working backwards.  This believe it or not is progress; and indeed sometimes to go forward, you do indeed have to go backwards.

Ultimately the end user is the king when it comes to determining the success of a product and by way of example; Microsoft Lync also demonstrates the fact quite bluntly both in monetary terms and in end user satisfaction.  If the end user interface can integrate with core products whilst providing a single ‘portal’ to all core features with a common interface, then it becomes a compelling USP.  Whether some elements are weaker than others, is largely irrelevant to the convenience for the end user.

So having been around the houses, what am I getting at…?

By working backwards from a single interface this shapes the culture all the way up the chain, ensuring that all key components back to the Vendor in question will become unified and therefore structured in a similar manner to provide the core product and services that the end user requires and therefore pay for.

Naturally Azlan is one of the components in the Vendor to End User chain and we have used the advantage offered from our position to ensure our services can now be delivered holistically at a commercial, strategic and technical level; ensuring the culture change needed to drive products such as Cisco UC, Microsoft Lync or any UC proposition is fully embedded throughout Azlan.

For you, the Reseller this will enable you to gain access to the entire Eco system that exists around UC, consisting of end points, infrastructure, and consultancy and so on. If you are ringing up your HP server person to gain a quote for an opportunity, talk to us about what you’re looking to achieve, we have a team of Solution Architects, Account Managers and Product Specialists at your disposal and we might just be able to add another zero to your revenue.

This is where value add really becomes value added….

Chris.Ovett@azlan.com