Frank Vitagliano: How to Use Distribution to Drive Innovation

I’ve been placing a bet on distribution. How about you? What role are distributors playing in your partner ecosystem strategy? Is it the right bet? Find out in this episode with Frank Vitagliano, CEO of Global Technology Distribution Council. Frank shares the results of their recent report titled The Innovation Enablement Guide, based on research with IT distributors and suppliers. Learn all the ways distributors can drive growth and accelerate innovation by bringing emerging technologies to market.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Here’s what I learned from Frank about the GTDC and their distribution research:

1. The GTDC is a non-profit trade association built to promote and educate the IT market on the role of distribution.
2. Many emerging technology companies have technical smarts but haven’t figured out how to go to market. The GTDC, funded by distributors, offers a free service to help technology vendors figure it out.
3. The Innovation Enablement Guide is based on research from the distributor and supplier communities.
4. Distributors have built specialized technology groups to provide better service to their suppliers and their customers (the partner community).
5. Distributors still play the traditional and vital role of bank and a warehouse, but now they also provide demand generation, technical support, partner onboarding and enablement, and much more.
6. Distributors help suppliers address the labor shortage by providing skilled sales and technical talent to drive sales and provide technical services to augment what the supplier or partners can provide.
7. No vendor’s single product is solving the customer’s issue, it takes multiple vendors’ products. Distributors can pull together all the components and the support associated for their solution providers to offer to end customers.
8. As the requirements of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) evolve, distributors offer valuable services to help the MSP provide expanded capabilities.
9. Distributors are developing marketplace platforms that offer the end-to-end approach to acquiring products, including provisioning, testing, back-end billing and collections, across multiple products.
10. Often underestimated is the data that distributors can provide on acquisitions of products over the past 25 years. Suppliers can use this data to identify sales opportunities based on adjacent products already sold and build a sales pipeline.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Connect with Frank on LinkedIn 
• Download a copy of The Innovation Enablement Guide
• Listen to Daren Finney on How to Use Distributors as Cloud Service Brokers
• Hear Ryan Walsh on What’s so different about Cloud Distribution?
• Try Impartner