Device procurement - do you all have rapport with vendors and VARs?

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Life-Assist7881@reddit

at 100-200 units/year you're big enough to get attention from smaller VARs but not so big that you need a supply chain team. I'd keep a primary VAR for convenience but maintain a secondary one for price checks and stock availability. also ask about consignment inventory—some VARs will hold buffer stock for you if you commit to a quarterly forecast.

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Connect_Exam3922@reddit

A VAR will help just laptops Even if the laptop volume feels small, a VAR will aggregate everything else you buy - headsets, monitors, docking stations, peripherals - so the overall relationship value is often bigger than you think. Curious about the US layout thing. If you're buying direct in the UK for example you'd normally get a UK keyboard and regional settings. Where are you based? That might change the advice. A lot of people assume Autopilot means configure-to-order from the manufacturer, which yes, means longer lead times. But a VAR can buy stock units and extract the Autopilot hardware hash for you - takes about 5 mins per device. So you get the clean zero-touch deployment without the wait. Worth looking at even if it's not on your radar right now. 100-200 units a year is decent for a smaller VAR. You're not too small. A good smaller VAR will often chuck in free advice on things like Autopilot setup, Intune, imaging etc if it leads to ongoing hardware and software sales. You'd be surprised how much more you get out of that vs just clicking buy on a vendor website.

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Connect_Exam3922@reddit

A VAR helps beyond just laptops. Even if the laptop volume feels small, a VAR will aggregate everything else you buy - headsets, monitors, docking stations, peripherals - so the overall relationship value is often bigger than you think. Curious about the US layout thing. If you're buying direct in the UK for example you'd normally get a UK keyboard and regional settings. Where are you based? That might change the advice. A lot of people assume Autopilot means configure-to-order from the manufacturer, which yes, means longer lead times. But a VAR can buy stock units and extract the Autopilot hardware hash for you - takes about 5 mins per device. So you get the clean zero-touch deployment without the wait. Worth looking at even if it's not on your radar right now. 100-200 units a year is decent for a smaller VAR. You're not too small. A good smaller VAR will often chuck in free advice on things like Autopilot setup, Intune, imaging etc if it leads to ongoing hardware and software sales. You'd be surprised how much more you get out of that vs just clicking buy on a vendor website.

Reply

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Connect_Exam3922@reddit

A VAR helps beyond just laptops. Even if the laptop volume feels small, a VAR will aggregate everything else you buy - headsets, monitors, docking stations, peripherals - so the overall relationship value is often bigger than you think. Curious about the US layout thing. If you're buying direct in the UK for example you'd normally get a UK keyboard and regional settings. Where are you based? That might change the advice. A lot of people assume Autopilot means configure-to-order from the manufacturer, which yes, means longer lead times. But a VAR can buy stock units and extract the Autopilot hardware hash for you - takes about 5 mins per device. So you get the clean zero-touch deployment without the wait. Worth looking at even if it's not on your radar right now. 100-200 units a year is decent for a smaller VAR. You're not too small. A good smaller VAR will often chuck in free advice on things like Autopilot setup, Intune, imaging etc if it leads to ongoing hardware and software sales. You'd be surprised how much more you get out of that vs just clicking buy on a vendor website.

Reply

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Connect_Exam3922@reddit

A VAR helps beyond just laptops. Even if the laptop volume feels small, a VAR will aggregate everything else you buy - headsets, monitors, docking stations, peripherals - so the overall relationship value is often bigger than you think. Curious about the US layout thing. If you're buying direct in the UK for example you'd normally get a UK keyboard and regional settings. Where are you based? That might change the advice. A lot of people assume Autopilot means configure-to-order from the manufacturer, which yes, means longer lead times. But a VAR can buy stock units and extract the Autopilot hardware hash for you - takes about 5 mins per device. So you get the clean zero/low touch deployment without the wait. Worth looking at even if it's not on your radar right now. 100-200 units a year is decent for a smaller VAR. You're not too small. A good smaller VAR will often chuck in free advice on things like Autopilot setup, Intune, imaging etc if it leads to ongoing hardware and software sales. You'd be surprised how much more you get out of that vs just clicking buy on a vendor website.

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gamebrigada@reddit

You can get into Dell Premier or sign up for an HP business account at a pretty small scale. I think I knocked on the right doors when I had 30ish users. You'll start getting discounts once you're in and build a relationship with the team they assign you. If the company is very new it can be hard. Dell will probably bounce you around a lot until they figure out your spending, and if your spending changes they'll bounce you around again. Very typical of them. They even did this when I was a 7 digit per year customer. If you just get a dell business account you'll get someone from India that will barely pay attention to you. If you get into Premier the account managers are much better. I had to start with business and kept asking to get into premier until they let me in. Building relationships with account managers/vars is an important part of being an IT buyer. My relationships and eagerness to push down pricing easily pays my salary.

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mcmatt93117@reddit

Yep, 100% can be worth it. Work for local county government. County staff is around 10k people, our 'branch' is around 300-ish? Our main VAR is also a VAR for other parts of the county, but they're individual relationships and same have a different person from the same VAR. We still spend...$500k most years, between licensing costs, server/networking hardware, desktop, laptops, etc. Last September, we needed to order 3TB of memory for our DR Nutanix cluster. Got a quote in September for around $24k. Didn't get full approval and PO generated until late December - long past the 30 day quote we'd gotten in September. In between Sept and December, memory prices obviously went through the roof and it was around $100k if we'd got an updated quote (went from $400 a stick to, currently seems to be like $3,500 a stick today). They honored the quote - they had NO obligation to do so, nor did we expect them to. 100% a VAR can be worth it, your size will depend on how much time/effort they'll put into you as a customer.

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GremlinNZ@reddit

Distis all the way in NZ, around 100 a year. Starting to use Autopilot to setup Intune to set policies, and a few scripts in RMM to de-bloat, load stuff etc. There is a setting in Intune for example to set the time zone... Unless you're in multiple time zones. Idea now is not to have golden images, and just use configs to setup what you want.

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Ok-Double-7982@reddit

Both. We actually buy our devices direct from the manufacturer. I use VARs mostly for software licensing, some hardware, but not large, batch orders.

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SquizzOC@reddit

Lots of VARs will take that business and do the value add, warehousing, imaging, etc…. Find a VAR and just ask. We do this for free for any customer that needs it, just standard practice these days. Gets easier for us and you when you get Intune deployed

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DheeradjS@reddit

100 per year is more than we do. The service is about as good as any big-box store. Your company (And mine) are simply too small to give more than a cursory look. We ain't in the league where we can drop a custom image off at dell.

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dracotrapnet@reddit

Eh, we just order whatever computers we need from OEM B-stock and OEM A-stock websites. We were occasionally buying refurbs on Amazon but the amount of returns and lingering issues were too high so that has been blocked. We nuke and pave our own image on every end user machine using PXE boot and a standard image. The few times we don't nuke the original install has been with MS Surfaces but we figured out how to usb bootstrap to PXE boot them a few years ago and get our own image on those. Imaging is also great that we can image any machine that is returned and have them ready for the next employee or do a chained upgrade where someone with an old high spec kit gets new high spec kit and their old high spec kit gets passed down to a lower usage need seat after imaging. Back a long time ago before we started our imaging CDW and the like always said they could image for us. Sure it could save us 30 min on imaging the first time we get new hardware but it has been better knowing we imaged it ourselves and the knowledge of imgaing and the specific image version used is our own make and fault rather than hassle of "Did the vendor put the old image on?" and contacting them to update image stuff as we revamp ours.

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gumbrilla@reddit

Yeah, I've found rapport is directly proportional to spend and their commission. We're small, we don't even order anything like what you do.. it's about as personal as Amazon. I really don't expect much. I think you can order de bloated, but if not, we just fresh start them in Intune and not worry about it. Got them to auto populate Autopilot once, that was nice.

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bwyer@reddit

As a VAR, I can vouch for this. The value-add part takes a lot of time and effort on our end. We can either spend that limited time we have on big deals that have great ROI or small deals that don’t.

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gumbrilla@reddit

Yeah, and if I met a VAR who didn't do this, I would think them an idiot and not use them. Catch 22.. Ok, maybe a VAR rep takes the odd charity case, but it is exactly that, charity. Some SME wouldn't get that from me, it'd be a some charity group with a mission I admired.

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bwyer@reddit

Exactly that. I do work with small companies on occasion and it's either a personal favor or something that I believe in. If, however, it's just business, I'm not going to work on a $5,000 GP deal when there's a $500,000 GP deal competing for my time. There are plenty of small VARs out there that specialize in SMB/Commercial deals. Sadly, they don't have the kind of resources we can bring to bear on the value-add side of things, but that's why we only do big deals. Those resources cost a lot of money and drive huge quotas.

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RevolutionaryWorry87@reddit

Medium sized company (1k users). We use a VAR. Takes all the procurement worries away.

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Device procurement - do you all have rapport with vendors and VARs?

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17 Comments

Life-Assist7881@reddit

Connect_Exam3922@reddit

Connect_Exam3922@reddit

Connect_Exam3922@reddit

Connect_Exam3922@reddit

gamebrigada@reddit

mcmatt93117@reddit

GremlinNZ@reddit

Ok-Double-7982@reddit

SquizzOC@reddit

DheeradjS@reddit

dracotrapnet@reddit

gumbrilla@reddit

bwyer@reddit

gumbrilla@reddit

bwyer@reddit

RevolutionaryWorry87@reddit