CompTIA Joint Council Meeting Examines the Role of Distribution in a Cloud-Centric World

CompTIA’s Partner, Telecom and Vendor Advisory Councils held a joint meeting yesterday morning at the association’s Annual Member Meeting, happening this week at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers. The meeting featured a presentation by Bharath Natarajan, director of product marketing, TDCloud and software services at Tech Data Corporation, on “the Role of Distribution in a Cloud-Centric World.”

To set the tone for his remarks, Natarajan began with a series of slides sourced from other authors and research firms. He noted that Delta Airlines is still operating on Windows XP – three operating systems updates behind – and that while anyone would love to get the business involved with updating Delta’s systems, no one would want to take the company through the amount of change management involved.

Throughout his presentation, Natarajan returned to the fact that selling cloud means an initial low cost to the customer, but if exceptional service is maintained, it means long term success for the seller. He broke down how distribution has changed in the last 30 years; with legacy distribution dominating the 1980s, value-based distribution defining the 1990s and 2000s and solution-based distribution in practice today.

Natarajan described “The Distribution Playbook” as he sees it today. He pointed out that going from one transaction per year to 12, as happens when a sales process moves to monthly billing, is a huge productivity drain that must be considered. For this reason and others, companies need new, different types of salespeople when moving to selling cloud – while retaining their more traditional salespeople for closing large deals. He emphasized customer enablement and concluded that distributors and resellers must commit to having a “cloud conversation” with their teams and customers – or their competition will have it instead.

The presentation concluded with a lively Q&A session that addressed, among other topics, how difficult it is to define what, exactly, is cloud revenue. Natarajan suggested that it might be up to CompTIA to establish such a definition so companies themselves don’t have to endlessly debate it.

Click here to learn more about the Partner Advisory Council, here to learn more about the Vendor Advisory Council and here to learn more about the Telecom Advisory Council.