Three channel leaders discuss the creative ways they’re tackling the memory shortage

Leaders from Tech Data, Computer Alliance and Champions of Change divulge their new ways of working.

As the price of SSD and RAM continues to rise in Australia, partners and distributors are working around the clock to mitigate the costs and keep customers happy.

Some partners are offsetting prices and refusing to increase costs for their customers, while others are trying to bring projects forward.

[Read More: CRN Deep Dive: How the memory shortage is impacting the channel]

Xara Tran, CEO and founder at Champions of Change has no plans to scale down regardless of RAM price increases.

She said she won’t pass the increase along to clients either.

“I will fight for them. But the other part is, I've got clients that where we have a good working relationship where they're accepting that this is going to happen,” she said.

"I've really worked on saving them some a ton of money, so I often offset these price increases by doing some other good work.”

Tran noted the sentiment she is hearing from clients is that they’re applying the same tactics to their business as if it was Covid again.

“Basically saying it's Covid times, there's no supply, in order to run our business, we need to buy as much as possible now, before we can't operate, that's what they're concerned about,” she said.

“We need to buy now and try to retain as much price as possible. Because we don't want to pay for that next predicted price rise globally.

"We need to be able to still operate some new projects that they have requires the infrastructure, that’s actually exacerbated by the rises.”

Accelerating work

To grapple with the rapidly rising SSD and RAM prices, Lee Gurd, general manager corporate, Computer Alliance has plans to expedite orders and projects to avoid cost rises.

“We're working with a couple of finance companies to try and look at inventive ways to finance projects that have budget applied, in some cases, in the next financial year, to try and avoid the cost ups for the customers,” he said.

For Computer Alliance, they have quite significant warehousing capability, so they can store a large amount of product.

“One of the things we're looking at doing with some of our major customers is bring projects in early, finance them, and then shelve those projects in the warehouse until such time as they're required,” Gurd explained.

According Gurd, everybody in the corporate space is having to come up with inventive ways of bringing in orders early for customers so that they can avoid these prices.

“What we're being told is that certainly these price increases are going to continue until at least July, and the expectation is that it will probably go beyond then as well,” he said.

“We've had figures mentioned to us of 60 percent by July on the cost ups that have already happened, which is eye watering. Our approach is to be as open and honest as we can be with our customers, to try and seek as much information as we can do from the vendors on what the expectations are.”

He added, “So far as those cost ups are concerned, passing that on, we've got a webinar later with one of our major customer groups, an education group, just to go through the landscape.”

From August this year, the reseller will be entering the education season but Gurd is preparing schools to get in orders earlier.

"We're advising a lot of our schools to look and think about purchasing now at today's price,” he said.

“The biggest challenge that we're facing at the moment is we've been provided with pricing that's only valid for 7 to 14 days,” he explained.

“It's very difficult to get any corporate business to make a decision, whether it be government or enterprise. By the time the decision made, the price is coming up, which is very frustrating.”

Diversifying work

For Tech Data they are embracing the role of the orchestrator and the aggregator, rather than solely supply chain, according to the Robbie Upcroft, country manager ANZ of the distie.

“A lot of the conversations I'm now having with some of our top partners, and indeed the vendors who have been impacted by this is ‘we can help’,” he said.

“We've got the relationships with the vendors, we know what's going on with the partners. But we can't do that. Mr. And Mrs. Partner, unless you share more holistically, your pipeline, your forecasts, the conversations that you're having with your customers.”

Upcroft noted that the more Tech Data knows about a partner, they can help them move forward in the queue.

"We've had a couple of partners, which is a good news story coming out of this, that have now been more open about wanting to partner more holistically and share deep pipe and deep forecast, which allows us to sort of better manage supply chain,” he said.

“It's a challenging time. It is cyclical. It's not all doom and gloom. Work more closely with your distributor, think about this as an opportunity to diversify vendors, disties, portfolios,” he ended.