channelcentral Blog

iQuote is great – anybody using it? This feature/benefit stuff is all well and good but do people use iQuote? We’ve got 6 UK & Ireland Distributors using, it, 4 Major UK resellers using it and a number of other Resellers accessing it via Distribution. Next up looks to be Benelux and then we have interest from other mainland Europe countries as well as organic growth in the UK & Ireland.

That translates to hundreds of users who are active now: generating around 1200 new quotations per month. HP’s PSG product range opens up to all Distributors in November and this coupled with the addition of dozens of new ProLiant server models will grow this number significantly in the remainder of this calendar year.

There’s no complacency though. iQuote has the headroom to deliver tens of thousands of quotations per month and we fully expect to achieve that in the not too distant future. Interested in iQuote? Please email us at: interested@channelcentral.net.

Sneak Preview of iQuote System Builder

Exciting new developments for iQuote. Apologies for the silence over the last couple of weeks. This is not due to any lack of activity here. As well as some back office improvements, some of which translate to faster performance for users, there has been two significant developments:

1. For servers with SATA Controllers we show SATA Disk Drives. However, once a SAS Controller has been added the SAS Disk Drives then appear as options. This is part of a concerted effort here to minimise the number of possible configurations that users can’t do in iQuote.
2. Possibly the biggest shift in the way that we operate has been to develop a System Builder for iQuote. iQuote System Builder is a process and system to easily add new models to iQuote. Look out for a more detailed Blog Article on this but user benefits include greater consistency and earlier access to newly launched systems (across Notebooks, Desktops, Workstations & Servers). Commercially it also means that Vendors or Distributors can add systems directly to iQuote and this opens up opportunities.

Our sales model means that ongoing development is INCLUDED in the subscription model. We only increase subscriptions for new territories, product groups or user groups. iQuote customers appreciate how beneficial this sales model is.

At a glance Maximum Quantities. Another small development that iQuote has recently undergone is within the System Unit Table of Contents (Specifications). It was already really easy to view the pre-installed quantities but more difficult to ascertain the maximum quantities. Now that is really easy too. On the right hand side it simply states the maximum quantity. For example:

Dual Processor System will show 1 installed and Max 2.

So what does Max Max mean? Sometimes the Maximum Quantity can be increased by adding options. Example:

System ships with 6 Hot-Pluggable Drive Bays so Max is 6. But you can add a 2nd Hot-Pluggable Drive Backplane to increase by a further 6 Drives. So Max is 6 but theoretical/conditional Max is 12.

iQuote simply displays that using 2 digits: 6 (12). The first figure is the maximum as the system ships and the figure in brackets is the theoretical/conditional maximum. We hope that helps.

A more complete view of iQuote utilisation is now available. It’s a minor thing but we now show ‘Management’ Users the number of New Quotes created and Exports carried out. This is in addition to previous figures that showed Saved Quotes. The New Quote figures provide a more accurate view of utilisation as less than 1 in 3 quotations are saved. The export figures are also useful just to see how users operate.

We still provide Options Attach figures however we only track that on Saved Quotations. For users that operate iQuote in Hosted Mode and Hosted-Integrated Mode we will provide some further data interrogation to split those figures up. We hope that you enjoy the enhanced stats.