BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

If you’re into the animated dreamscenes that can be set as your desktop background in Vista then check this one out for the Christmas season. Falling snow, a snowman, pine trees… all I need now is some chestnuts and a fire…

Have a merry Christmas everyone!

So last might was the Midlands SBS User Group xmas do, and what an excellent night it was! I’m writing this at 5PM the next day and only now am I beginning to think about being able to string a coherent sentence together

Thanks to Will for putting the whole thing together, and to Vijay for sharing the pics.

Don’t forget the SBS deployment services offer ends December 31st, so if you’ve deployed SBS between Sept. ‘07 and Dec. ‘07 make sure you claim your rebate now

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t capitalise on these offers. It is tantamount to throwing money down the drain! Don’t lose out  - do it NOW before you forget

At a recent internal meeting one of the talking points was distribution and how much it can effect our ability to deliver our promises to our end users. We discussed who we liked dealing with, the reasons why and from a business perspective the ones that gave best value. The discussion started as a result of the recent Westcoast Small Business forum, which unfortunately I couldn’t attend but a colleague came back from with very positive results.

I’ve blogged about distribution before and in particular about needing accounts with multiple disties in order to cope with the fact that often the items you want are out of stock at one but in stock at another. Unfortunately this picture doesn’t seem likely to change so the question is if we have to use multiple disties who is our preferred supplier and in what order do the rest follow?

Here is our shortlist and the reasons why:

1. Westcoast - These guys understand the SME & SBS market and are currently making a real effort to embrace the SBSC community. They provide an account manager who couldn’t be more helpful and nothing is too much trouble. Regular reviews of our credit account, competitive pricing and new reseller tools all help put Westcoast at the top of our list. Our only gripe is there are a couple of product lines they don’t stock which we sell regularly.
2. Ingram Micro - Pushed out of our top slot by Westcoast,  we have had a long standing relationship with Ingram which works well for us. Competitive pricing and decent stock levels is an asset. We have a decent account manager but sometimes find their returns policy difficult to implement.
3. Northamber/MicroP - These two are in joint 3rd as we couldn’t really split them on pricing or account management. Both provide a perfectly acceptable service but don’t really go that extra mile. If I really had to choose between them I’d go for MicroP as they are slightly more pro-active.

We also have credit facilities at C2K, Bell Micro and Blue Solutions but we don’t use them unless we have to as they either aren’t competitive or have high delivery charges etc.

Are there any disties we wouldn’t deal with? Yes! Enta is a company we are never likely to engage with. The reason is simple - they approached us and tried to persuade us to use them, although they couldn’t provide any kind of unique selling point. On top of that they refused to give us any kind of credit account even though our credit rating is good and we could provide credit references from the other main disties. To further compound the issue they then starting calling every few days even though we had told them they were were wasting their time as they wouldn’t give us a credit account!

What would your top 3 be? Answers on a postcard please!

We got caught out by this one yesterday as the IBM server we were updating remotely with SP2 had Broadcom NIC’s installed.

In this case it was severe enough to knock out our remote access completely so we had to attend site to sort it out. Luckily one of our helpdesk techies is an avid reader of the SBS blog and he remembered seeing this article.

The old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here I think!