Intel Australia is attributing a 20 per cent increase in server sales over the past three quarters to an influx of new channel players.
“A lot of system builders are saying they haven’t played in this space before,” A/NZ sales manager, Andrew McLean, said. “They can build these servers themselves with an Intel distributor or integrate systems from other resellers in the channel that specialise in servers.
“We’ve got a big business in Australia and there are lots of incremental opportunities.”
Intel general manager of the worldwide reseller channel organisation, Steve Dallman, who visited Sydney last week, cited increasing opportunity for local builders in the SMB market.
“Most of the things we’re seeing globally through the channel is that small businesses are looking for ways to improve productivity,” he said. “Beforehand they might have been happy with a desktop holding their records, but they’re starting to get a bit weary now about document retention and they’re looking at servers in order to store documents.”
According to Dallman, smaller businesses are also using servers to integrate all their daily tools, data and how employees interact.
“What used to be reserved for a large enterprise organisation is today coming through to SMBs and they’re trying to take advantage of these productivity tools to enhance their own business,” he said. “The channel does become the IT organisation for a lot of the SMBs they look after.”
Dallman said each of Intel’s geographic region was looking into ways of further developing its server program. Although the channel was outdoing other parts of the world in terms of building servers and delivering them quickly into the market place, he pointed out logistics was an ongoing challenge.
“It takes a long time to get product here and when some of our customers want a server they can’t afford to wait two months till something ships,” Dallman said. “We’re going to figure out some of the logistical solutions that we have, if we need to invest more in local inventory and then train customers on what that inventory is so they don’t have to wait two months.”
