Case study 11
A channel view from Unisys
As an organisation Unisys is very much reliant on its channel strategy. Unisys' view is that their channels are not just a traditional route to market, a way to sell in solutions and products. But that they are also potential partners and potential solution partners that can help Unisys construct more specific propositions to specific market segments.
By allying your channel strategy with your segmentation strategy you can say what are the needs of our customers? Not just need for technology, but what are the needs of our customers for solutions for that technology and service together?
You can really start to understand that the need is not just for technology, nor is the need just for high-level service. The need is for business continuity solutions. And if we are just looking at the channel strategy you can easily overlook that.
So, the outworking of that example might be that instead of just a Unisys as an integrator and a Dell as a technology provider, there?s a Unisys, a Dell, an EMC that provides storage, a Nortel or a Cisco that provides the mission critical networking, an Oracle that provides an application suite that allows that business continuity to happen.
So the channel strategy becomes a partnering strategy for solutions and it really starts to broaden out the scope.