CSG Partner of the Year: Softcat

Softcat is a huge channel player in the U.K. However, the CSG Award might be surprising given just a couple of years ago, Softcat “wasn’t a big CSG player.”

“We’ve worked with Softcat since we joined the channel in 2007. They were very early adopters of Dell. But at that point they weren’t a particularly a large client partner; they were a software partner. [But] over the last three years, during the pandemic, Softcat accelerated their client solutions business. And we jointly enjoy a great business, built on trust and predictability. Softcat is one of our fastest growing and largest players,” said Tomlin.

For his part, Softcat CEO Graeme Watt agreed that at the start of the pandemic, “we weren’t such a big CSG player across the whole company. We weren’t very good at it, frankly.

“The sales guys were a little bit wary of getting their hands on a device deal. Because it had a high chance of failure, there wasn’t much margin on it. But Dell has really helped us get our act together on CSG. We saw some big deals flying out the door early on in the pandemic and we were saying, ‘we don’t have those capabilities, but we sure as hell would like to.’

“Of course, the whole environment around the PC has changed. It’s gone from being something that people were calling the death of 10 years now to being the most key collaborative tool that the workforce can have.”

Watt also said that “Dell invests a lot of people, time and resource into us, and that’s really important. That helps us be effective. It helps us have the right accreditations and be an effective partner for Dell with our customers.”

Moving forward, he said Softcat was looking at partnering earlier with Dell on deals.

“We’re trying to shift that really close collaboration we’ve got at the customer level to earlier in the cycle. So working with a customer earlier and working with Dell earlier. And that creates a lot of stickiness in the deal for both of us and stop, other factors coming into play.”

Like Synapse360’s Douglas, Watt said another “strong string to Dell’s bow” is how it has been managing supply chain “ahead of the competition.”

“Dell has done a really good job of having that inventory available for us, either directly or through distribution. That’s been a key medium-term advantage,” he said.