Greening the channel

I work for a technology company and our channel to market is through IT distributors and then resellers. It's an ongoing dilemma for us that our whilst our product is designed to offer sustainability benefits, it might be resold by companies which don't have a carbon abatement policy. But to restrict our channel only to resellers with green credentials would not be commercially sustainable. Today, I had the opportunity to meet with resellers at the Reseller Leadership Forum run by CRN magazine.

First observation is that the interactive session on sustainability was not so well attended as the others running simultaneously with it - perhaps an indication that the channel's engagement with the issue is lagging behind that of the organisations they supply. Second observation is that if this is the case, the resellers who do engage with the issue stand to benefit hugely because they will little competition. And final thought is that if refresh cycles for hardware become longer - as many of us expect - then resellers will be forced to face up to the fact that they need create new revenue streams to replace this lost income. Services around balanced device deployment, energy management and paper-free document solutions are natural choices.