back to article Microsoft took away $4m of our profits, laments mighty reseller

The cost of redundancies and restructuring together with the biting changes Microsoft made to sales incentives almost wiped out the profit that Insight Enterprises made in EMEA during Q4, closing the curtains on a year of change. The reseller titan reported a five per cent regional sales spike to $397.6m in the final quarter …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    An upturn in the downturn?

    `Microsoft is making swingeing cuts to rebates .. has "resulted" in $4m of lower software incentives, "primarily in the EMEA operating segment" .. CEO Ken Lamneck said he was tickled pink the EMEA biz was back on the revenue growth track'

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The moral of the story is don't put all your eggs in one basketcase.

  3. terry 1

    unfair to MS

    I'm not entirely sure that MS should be to blame here.Yes, W8 is a bitch and shoving everything into the cloud means less recurring profits, however as an ex insight user/buyer I found that their prices were often higher than say ebuyer, had poor range, their couriers turned up often 3 days later than expected and they had such a high 'account manager' churn that I had no idea who my manager is / was.

    So their losses doesn't surprise me

    1. Snapper
      Unhappy

      Re: unfair to MS

      Yup, Tech Data (TIFKACOMPUTER2000) is too expensive compared to ebuyer and even Amazon at times. I can buy an HP printer cheaper inc VAT than TD sell it ex VAT, and get it delivered free or for less than £10 next day, rather than TD's standard £15 + VAT.

      I thought the idea of being a distributor was to buy at significantly lower prices than 'trade price' and then sell to retail/suppliers at 'trade price', who in turn added their own margin so that everyone made money. Perhaps that idea has become old-fashioned?

      And perhaps they ought to re-educate the person responsible for keeping stock replenished. Most of what they have in their on-line catalogue is listed as zero stock with no guaranteed delivery date.

      Call it tail-spin or circling the plug-hole, they need to straighten themselves out or we will start getting 'TD is doomed' and 'Beleaguered TD' headlines.

      Oh wait, we are!

  4. James 100

    Disintermediation?

    Does the software market really need "resellers" to such a significant extent now? For hardware, yes, you have distribution, spares, warranty service ... none of that applies to software, where just buying the download rights and activation keys directly from Microsoft (or other supplier) seems better all round, IMO. Exactly what my own small company has done for Windows, Office, Sage, Google Apps, Dropbox and the AV package, in fact: are we really losing out on anything at all by going direct instead of paying for a "reseller" to get in between us?

    1. Goat Jam

      Executards

      "Does the software market really need "resellers" to such a significant extent now?"

      Software resellers could essentially be redesignated as "licence compliance consultants", their main purpose being to navigate the minefield that is MS SKU's & licencing on behalf of their hapless customers.

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