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Research Outline
Prepared for Jennifer | Delivered May 30, 2020
IT Technology Consultants Motivations
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Goals
To understand what motivates small business technology consultants to partner with technology vendors. This information will be used as stimulus for an audience workshop with technology clients.
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Early Findings
IT Consultants for Small Businesses
Small businesses tend to hire
IT consultants
for their needs as they cannot afford to have a full-time IT employee.
Larger companies would usually have a
full-time individual
on the payroll.
IT consultants for small business argue that it
would be cheaper
for small companies to hire them than to recruit a full-time employee.
However, when these companies acquire
a web server,
they start needing numerous other specialist services and require IT consultants to perform them.
Other
IT services
that can required by small businesses include payroll, email system,
e
c
o
m
m
e
r
c
e
systems, network and computer protection, and data backup.
Examples of Partnerships
Small business consultancies such as CMIT Solutions have exclusive partnerships with vendors such as Dell, Microsoft,
L
e
x
m
a
r
k
, Intuit,
Barracuda, and
D
a
t
t
o
.
Partnerships with IT Vendors
IT consultants are motivated to
partner with vendors
to obtain better terms in their contracts with them, but also to benefit from a better flexibility in terms of supplying conditions, and be able to offer cost-effective solutions to their clients.
Other IT consulting companies claim to be
vendor-neutral
to be able to provide objective recommendations based on the specific needs of their clients.
Traditionally, IT consultants enter into partnership agreements with numerous vendors to have access to a large array of offerings, and vendors provide them with
training and certification.
Partner IT consultants are also paid commissions by the vendor when they
conclude sales
with their clients.
This is called the "reseller partnership" and has been the main model of the
IT consultant-vendor partnership
for decades.
However, the model is changing with th
e decrease of commissions
and vendors now prefer to deal directly with the client.
This affects smaller consultancies more, such as
E
n
v
i
s
i
a
n
, who decided to strategically limit the number of vendors with which they
partner and train.
The company also decided to stop
relying only on commissions
from their vendor partners and become more independent and objective.
E
n
v
i
s
i
a
n
chose to remain
independent and objective b
y trading the commission on a potential partner product sale for the lower ‘finders’ fee of recommending a competitor.
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