Who said the global supply chain is easy?
by
Sean Smith, Global Services Director—Americas, at Viadex Global
Freshly arrived in the US, I bring tidings of great joy. I’m meeting VAR, SI, and CSP clients from the East Coast to the West, from north to south and everywhere in-between. Mexico and Canada figure on the schedule too. Similar issues have dominated most conversations.
Our Mexico entity is already supporting US-based and European-based clients operationally, with their local in-country technology procurement requirements, as well as more complicated NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) Certification import requirements.
Clients want to expand. The world is full of opportunities—and a number of hitherto unexpected threats—but the problem comes when you try to take advantage of the former and ensure robust contingency planning for the latter. Costs pile up and delays occur because shipping essential networking and data centre infrastructure around the globe never works out to be quite as easy as one would have thought.
Any U.S. company can basically roam free across the United States and vendors will be there for them. They’ll support them. They’ll pledge to strategic partnerships with them. They’ll be all-round good guys and they will help you win 70% of your customer’s business. Viadex works with the bluest of blue-chip OEMs and vendors all over the world and we know this to be true: their systems and supply chains are robust across the USA and they do whatever is in their power to make happen what you need to happen. In the USA. Viadex can help you capture the 20-30% of the spend your clients are doing globally, but is likely to be outside of your current reach.
The challenge: From the U.S and beyond
If your customers’ plans involve global expansion into pretty much any other geography in the world many bets, if not all, are off. While purchasing in the U.S. for the rest of the world is possible, and distribution partners and vendors will align pricing for you, that’s where the upliftment ends. They will not be responsible for delivery outside of the territory.
Regardless of your spend at home, if you want to establish other ties in another country, you are courteously referred to the vendor’s local office in that country. Your transaction history effectively starts life with a brand new zero history; no accrued discount, no aggregated or consolidated spend benefits; no more intimate support from the vendor’s U.S. base, just a polite intro to the local office and without a local entity, you are still unable to purchase locally! Yet that expansion is increasingly critical as the global hyperscalers (Azure, AWS, GCP) drive the growth of countries’ infrastructures.
Viadex has a working formula that makes it possible to consolidate your spend in the U.S. while deploying into another country. On average, we manage complex projects—from order to shipment, to clearance and compliance, right the way through to on-site implementation—in 60 to 70 unique countries per quarter.
On a regular basis, Viadex teams—in conjunction with our local, on-the-ground ecosystem of logistics, compliance and engineering partners—are actively supporting and realising clients’ growth aspirations in more than 190 countries. You can download a list of the countries we operate in here.
The success formula for global tech project deployments
That’s our formula; right there. A global ecosystem that feeds into and is driven by one single point of contact in one place: The U.S. Who said the global supply chain is easy? We did, because we make it so. Is it important? Enormously so.
- Ensure continuity of operations: COVID taught the world of technology and business that reliance on single on-prem datacentres is a strategy from a different age. Reliance on the cloud expanded as organisations had to enable home-based workforces, as online collaboration replaced physical contact, and even as IT teams were temporarily hampered because they couldn’t enter company premises.
- Minimise risk: As it seems now to be receding from pandemic to endemic status, COVID has left a legacy on the tech world; the pressing requirement to cover your bases. With geo-political horizons now changing with dramatic frequency these geo-dispersed bases become important for more than being platforms for international business growth.
- Do it fast: Decisions taken now have to be swung into action now. COVID took us all by surprise and it taught the commercial world to plan for the unplannable. This is not about AI-powered insights; it’s about good common and business sense in what is currently an unstable world.
For whatever reason, expediency is the name of the game. Moving fast means knowing that you can overcome any challenge along the way to geo-dispersed IT deployments. ‘Buy U.S-deploy anywhere’ is our mantra.
Global growth needs geo-dispersed support
We make it possible for VARs, SIs, and CSPs to purchase in the U.S, and benefit from consolidated spend. Then we take the journey to your destination, ready to install, test, and implement your solution when it arrives. The U.S vendor will ship to the states and after that, it’s up to you. The hurdles that will come up along the global journey will be so much easier to overcome when you leave it up to Viadex.
We handle approximately 4,000 projects of this nature every year. The chances are you may be a first-timer. If you decide to use the services of a 3PL provider you’ll get a certain way along the way. Then you have to ensure detailed response to and documentation for local rules, import procedures, compliance regulations and on some occasions just the sheer burgeoning complexity of the way they may do things in certain countries. Then, overcoming those hurdles to getting the equipment out of the U.S. and into another country, you need to get it installed, tested, and operational. Then you may even need services support.
This is what I’d call MPOC, or multiple points of contact. Worse still, it probably becomes WTMPOC: Way Too Many Points of Contact. The more I meet with organisations in the U.S. who are facing these challenges, the more a sense of relief pervades the conversations when I explain the Viadex formula for global tech projects. Any time you’d like to know about leveraging your purchasing power with your U.S. vendor and then using it as a springboard for global growth, just get in touch. Prepare for those tidings of great joy, replacing the ‘Ow!’ with the ‘Wow’!
If you would like to chat further, get in touch at: Sean.Smith@viadex.com
