APC is a regular name amongst the ARN awards winners, and this is the second time it has picked up the Specialist Vendor of the Year award.
So what makes it such a prominent figure in the Australian channel? According to APC country general manager, Gordon Makryllos, it has been the continued mandate to support its channel 100 per cent.
This year, the vendor took the significant step to invest in a local logistics and warehousing facility. And this investment was significant – APC stores over $10 million worth of stock in Australia at a time when running on lean inventory is a holy grail for logistics, and this is done so channel partners can enjoy maximum availability.
“We can support our channel partners with configurations and assemblies, and regardless of what the partner is looking to roll out, it’s tailored to the customer and a big part of our value propositions is also its availability,” Makryllos said.
APC has also made significant investments in training. Over the past 12 months about 150 sales professionals have gone through the accreditation process. This is in addition to the regular briefings and non-certification training.
But, of course, APC isn’t resting on its laurels either. Makryllos said the vendor understands it needs to keep innovating and collaborating with the channel if it wants to win this category again next year, and has already identified a plan of attack to do just that.
“What we’re investing in over the next 12+ months is cloud computing. That’s a big trend that everyone is talking about, and different people need different things,” he said.
“There are a number of companies in Australia - both local and global - who are looking to set up hosting and collocation sites. And we see the reseller channel reselling having a roll in hosting services, so we see the channel selling cloud computing if you like.
“We’ve set that up with a number of partners such as iseek in Brisbane and Canberra Data Centres in Canberra. We’re working with those partners and we’ve set up a process and an operation whereby resellers can sell compute capacity.”
But that’s not all. APC’s other award this year was for its ‘greenness,’ and energy efficiency, which will be an opportunity for partners as well in the coming years.
“We’ve recently conducted a survey and we’ve found that there’s about 90,000 datacentres in Australia, and they’ve got significant challenges. But the biggest challenge is energy costs, they’re still continuing to rise and IT is a big user of consumer of energy costs. So we’re seeing the energy cost of running a computer room, server room or datacentre is becoming a big issue,” Makryllos said.
