Our friends at Computer Reseller News have published an interesting ranking of UK resellers this week, along with a new end user survey. Both are available on the CRN website here.
The list of 100 players certainly serves to highlight a few things. For starters, the reselling landscape consists of a number of sizeable names (and one Hatfield-based one in particular!), plus a very long tail of smaller, often regionally-focused players. Consolidation en masse has just never happened.
Meanwhile, this is one top player list where, unlike TechMarketView’s SITS ranking (see UK SITS rankings 2011), a prominent ranking position may cause a degree of discomfort to some (but admittedly not all) players. This is of course because many of these companies have for years presented themselves to the world not as resellers, or even value-added resellers. They are managed services providers, infrastructure services players or at the very least purveyors of technology solutions. All very understandable given market trends, but to this day the majority of the revenues used to compile CRN’s rankings come from reselling.
We shouldn’t forget, moreover, that many leading IT services players not on CRN’s list also do a lot of product business under the cover of services contracts. They just don’t tend to split out the product numbers and they’ve never been called resellers. All in all, product resale largely remains a tough, growth-challenged, margin-testing part of the tech market. But it’s still big business and it’s not about to vapourise into the cloud.