The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed unprecedented disruption on countless parts of our lives. It also changed our behaviors and accelerated many ongoing trends. For me, the most significant impact has been on how businesses of all sizes approach technology purchases. The arrival of a global pandemic just accelerated the trend away from the annual cycle of buying the latest shiny technology or the fastest product.
Today, the consensus is that individual products deployed are far less important than the broader view: finding the right combination of technologies to meet business objectives.
After spending years edging toward digital transformation goals, the pandemic forced companies to find new ways of working almost overnight, ensuring that employees could remain productive while working from home.
One year later, many businesses have established a status quo. This means they are ready to move past the short-term fixes and make more strategic plans for their IT Infrastructures. And they are looking for trusted advisors to guide them through the process.
This represents a massive opportunity for Fujitsu Channel partners as well as presenting new challenges. A change in emphasis away from products to addressing a more holistic set of business challenges requires different skills and a new approach to selling.
This consultative approach requires a deep understanding of four elements:
• the financial context of projects
• customers’ businesses and the markets in which they operate
• a breadth of technology expertise across multiple different technology categories
• access to appropriate products and solutions
My team is dedicated to enabling Fujitsu SELECT partners to transition to consultative sales and win involvement in larger projects. We’re here to provide all the necessary support and guidance that our partners need to succeed. But we don’t just expect our partners to do this alone – we’ve put together a number of initiatives to boost their progress.
Access to appropriate products and solutions
The Fujitsu portfolio is based around key business challenges. We’ve given Channel partners access to our Data Driven Transformation solutions, spanning the edge, the core and the cloud. The solutions help businesses optimize the balance of workloads across both multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
With our data-driven transformation strategy for SAP business environments, we provide a proven and holistic approach for creating data-driven intelligence and infrastructure solutions regardless of your data landscape complexity. And our extensive portfolio is designed to help enterprises to keep pace with the drive for increased workplace mobility, collaboration, personalization, and flexibility.
Here, data is king – and the ability to help businesses store, manage, protect and leverage data effectively is what we believe will drive their long-term business success.
For a complete list of the full breadth of Fujitsu products available to Channel Partners – visit our Corporate Partner Portal.
How to help manage the financial context of projects
In an ideal world, businesses would be able to immediately deploy all the technology they need to roll out new business models or adapt to future demand. But the reality is that most are carefully watching their cash flow. Fujitsu’s flexible uSCALE purchasing options offer attractive payment plans for our service provider partners and channel partner customers.
The usage-based payment means infrastructure investment moves into operational expenditure (Opex), facilitating risk-free expansion and immediate access to the latest high-end infrastructure technology. The plans require no upfront payment and instantly offer the flexibility to scale up and down, depending on whatever the future holds.
A deep understanding of customers’ businesses and the markets they operate in
Fujitsu’s SELECT Partner Program is centered around helping partners gain expertise in the topics they need to be successful. We offer a free, comprehensive and flexible range of online and face-to-face training resources designed around the latest customer requirements with deep dives into specific verticals delivered by a combination of e-learning, virtual instructor-led training and practical exercises via the Fujitsu SELECT Academy.
Breadth of technical expertise across multiple different technology categories
Another major challenge raised by the need to focus on business needs is that the solutions required are often extremely large and complex, spanning multiple systems and technology fields. The breadth of expertise needed is often beyond the scale of individual partners.
That’s where our Fujitsu Ecosystem Platform comes in. The Ecosystem platform facilitates and encourages new partner-to-partner relationships and micro-alliances where multiple partners collaborate to deliver complete customer solutions.
This means that partners of all sizes have the potential to participate in higher-value, more complex customer projects. (If you haven’t signed up yet – I encourage you to asap!)
There’s no time like the present
For any partners considering branching into new areas or trying new business models – now is the time. There are many opportunities for the Channel right now, and we’re here to help you seize them.
As we’ve shared in our 2021 IT Channel predictions, there are some immediate growth opportunities, for example, in markets such as education, the public sector and healthcare.
There’s also a need for businesses in all industries to revisit their security policies – a recent report shows that more than half of companies have failed to keep their security up to date with significant changes, leaving them open to cybercrime.
We’ve said many times that the Fujitsu philosophy is rooted in the belief that sales should solve real customer problems and deliver true business value. If we don’t help our partners achieve the same, we will not come through on our core promise. We’re stronger together – so we’re here to help.
