Tech Data will bring its full StreamOne cloud, SaaS and app store to Canada in the next month as it continues to take the platform global.
Phil Filippelli, vice president of eBusiness at Tech Data
LAS VEGAS – Tech Data’s full StreamOne e-business platform will be launching in Canada as early as next month, multiple executives at the distributor told ChannelBuzz.ca at the company’s fall 2014 TechSelect reseller community gathering here.
Already in place in the U.S. and intended to eventually roll out globally wherever Tech Data has presence, StreamOne is an umbrella of programs that covers cloud offerings, software-as-a-service, and more. It’s been represented in Canada by the company’s software licensing tool since 2011, but in November, the full offering, including its application store, will be coming to Canada, Tech Data Americas president Joe Quaglia confirmed.
The distributor has been focused on growing out the linecard for the offering, and Quaglia cited Microsoft, which has just integrated Azure and Office 365 into the platform, as a major addition. With Microsoft soon to be integrated, and other offerings including those from McAfee, Oracle, and IBM’s Softlayer platform either in place or en route, Quaglia said Tech Data is “trying to create standards in the cloud marketplace.”
Phil Filippelli, vice president of eBusiness at Tech Data, said the StreamOne lineup contains about 100 vendors, many of which offer multiple offerings through the site. The core of the tool is an app store-like environment for purchasing, procuring, and provisioning a variety of cloud-based, SaaS, and license-based software solutions.
The site will offer “true cloud aggregation,” Filippelli said. Solution providers will be able to provision any given customer with multiple solutions from multiple vendors within StreamOne, and present it all with a single bill to the customer, all able to be white-labeled as far as the customer is concerned.
Filippelli said the exact lineup of vendors for the Canadian launch of the full site is still to be determined, although he said he hopes to have the same linecard in Canada as it has in the U.S. sooner rather than later.
“It’s one global platform, so it’s just a matter of working out the Ts and Cs with our vendors in the Canadian market,” he said.
While it’s strong on the IaaS players, including Azure, SoftLayer, Amazon, VMware, and Cisco, Filippelli said the distributor is turning its attention towards applications and SaaS offerings and getting them hooked up to the StreamOne store. While that will mean Tech Data courting major players in the field, he stressed that the site can be self-service for smaller SaaS or cloud vendors, down to and including solution providers introducing their own repeatable solutions as services that other solution providers can resell. Filippelli said potential StreamOne vendors can “self-onboard” onto the site and get in front of the channel through the site.
While the Canadian launch of the full StreamOne platform is likely the biggest development on the e-business front for Tech Data’s Canadian operations, Canadian partners may want to keep an eye on what else the distributor is up to in the space. At TechSelect last week, the distributor introduced a new version of its Web site specialized for small business-focused solution providers. Located at TDsmb.com, the new site introduces a new face to the Web site, and more importantly to Filippelli, shows that the distributor can be nimble.
“If you look at our Web site, it really was one size fits all,” he said. “It serves us well, but when you look at driving the customer experience, we wanted to create a platform with some flexibility.”
With the SMB in mind, the site introduces some new functionality, including “a window” into Tech Data’s ERP system, which attempts to make sure that smaller resellers’ orders are handled properly and clearly.
“The ratio of sales to customers is SMB is pretty large, and unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen to good orders, so we built a module to watch the ERP systems, and if something doesn’t look right, it tells the customer on the dashboard both what is going on, and how it’s going to fix it,” Filippelli said.
Right now, the TDsmb site is U.S.-only, although Filippelli suggested it would launch in Canada during 2015.
