3 Takeaways from CompTIA EMEA
I attended the CompTIA EMEA conference in London on November 9, to understand what was on the mind of the IT community, and particularly the channel in Europe. I was interested to see to what extent they were interested in and embracing MPS.
The first thing that struck me was the number of sponsors and exhibitors from the printing and imaging world. Xerox, Ricoh, Sharp, Kyocera and Print Fleet all had stands at the conference, although HP was notable by its absence. Talking to these exhibitors, I got the feeling that there was a fair degree of interest in MPS from the attendees.
The second big impression was how fragmented the IT channel still is. This was evident from the number of quite small IT VARs present, and the focus of many of the presentations on how to help entrepreneurial companies grow and adapt to a changing business environment. Does that sound familiar?
The introductory keynote speech was an impressive presentation by Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, a prominent venture capital firm which invests particularly in technology based business models. Ariadne Capital has a distinctive approach, which focuses on a new business model for entrepreneurial development, which they have labelled as “Ecosystem Economics”.
A key point in this model is that technology alone is no longer enough. The companies who succeed must be nimble and flexible in keeping abreast of changing customer needs, and harnessing technology to provide a constantly evolving stream of products and services, which meet these needs.
However, they also need to be able to scale quickly. Julie spoke about the “David and Goliath” model, where small entrepreneurial companies need to work in partnership with large established corporates in a symbiotic relationship – the small companies providing the new ideas and services, the larger partners providing the expertise and customer access to take them to market. Julie cited some compelling examples of start-ups in which Ariadne had invested, which had succeeded by harnessing themselves to large corporate partners. Again, this sounds similar to the MPS world, where a core of large corporate vendors is surrounded by a large and diverse ecosystem of much smaller software and infrastructure providers.
The third takeaway for me was the scale of the challenge facing the IT channel in adapting to the new business model presented by the Cloud. For IT resellers who have historically provided onsite server-based, solutions, with attractive margins on both hardware and software, the move to a new model based on software as a service represents a challenge no less daunting than the one facing office products dealers, who need to move up into MPS. This may polarise the IT channel. Some resellers, especially the smaller ones serving SMB clients, may be so preoccupied adopting to the new Cloud based business model that they don’t have time to think about anything else. Others, with a broader vision, may see the move to a service-based model as an opportunity to take on a wider array of related services, including MPS, and so provide a more comprehensive offering for their clients.
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