Musings on the channel

Living in the business development world like I do I'm always looking closely at (obsessing over?) where we succeed and where we fail. It's essential to understand both (although I much prefer looking at the former rather than the latter for obvious reasons). It's also hard to get to the real truth as it can often be a case of success having many parents and failure being an orphan.

We have built a very successful, vibrant channel for Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a very short period of time (less than a year) despite a very real initial scepticism about the hosted model and in the face of some very stiff and very slick competition.

One thing has been our resolute and complete insistence on a channel model. We do not sell direct. We do not offer consultancy, training, development or any of that good stuff our partners do. On one level this has been hard. There's a lot of good money in adding these services. On the other hand it was a 'no brainer' and I'll tell you why.

We're a hosting company! We're not a CRM house. Our people, skill sets, expertise, business acumen, infrastructure, ongoing investments, [deep breath] internal mechanisms, ideology, partnerships and approach have been forged on the anvil of hosted services, not Microsoft Dynamics consultancy. By not trying to fix what ain't broken I think we've been able to provide something that the Dynamics Partner community, largely, really wants. A specialist Microsoft-based hosting provider which is really rather good at delivering applications on demand. As opposed to a really rather rubbish Dynamics Partner that happens to do hosting, which was the alternative.

By grasping this nettle I think we've carved a good niche for ourselves. We're not a telco-doing-hosting-as-well nor are we a Dynamics-Partner-doing-hosting-as-well. We're a hoster doing hosting. Makes sense really.

Please ignore the fact that this post has sidestepped what we do badly- I will go into this, probably on a Monday morning when I'm feeling hacked off. :-)