Nearly 20 years after the .com crash, the cause of which was due (in part) to the hype around eCommerce, you would think it would be relatively easy to buy a Server online from a Reseller or Retailer. Well channelcentral knows the answer as we’ve surveyed 21 online Resellers/Retailers in the UK during October 2018 – a market that is well established with eCommerce.
The Server Market is now consolidated so that there are only three or four vendors of scale who sell via the Channel. We picked the two biggest: HPE and Dell/EMC. Three SKUs each from their stock/promo supply chain ranging from single CPU tower to dual CPU rack. We have expected that Lenovo, Fujitsu would be similar and we weren’t sure whether Cisco sold Servers ex-stock.
In the Survey we looked at a number of basics:
- Was the System Unit available?
- Did the Store offer Hardware Options? Software? Services?
- Were Product Reviews available? Leasing/Finance? Promotions?
- Did anyone offer CPQ (Configure Price Quote)? channelcentral’s favourite subject.
- What else was interesting? Any best practices? Any worst practices?
The results were incredibly insightful and so we’ll be releasing the information in the following ways:
- Look out for our Blog articles as we feed conclusions into it.
- We’ll issue the entire Survey as a White Paper.
- For people with tiny attention spans we’ll do an Infographic.
- Any Reseller who was in the Survey can get a version of the White Paper with their performance benchmarked against the other 20.
Importantly, channelcentral wasn’t asked to conduct a survey, it’s not sponsored by anyone and our software resides in Distribution. Where we have a potential conflict of interest we happily point it out. In other words we’re 100% impartial.
If your job is selling Server, Software, Services & Accessories/Options, be prepared.
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