Tech Data is a global provider of technology products, solutions, and services. The company provides channel partners with the expertise and the market reach to help bring their products to market in an efficient way. In the IoT space, Tech Data acts a solution aggregator, working with a variety of partners to bring comprehensive IoT solutions to market. These solutions span several vertical markets, including industrial verticals such as manufacturing and energy, as well as logistics, healthcare, retail, and smart cities. In addition to the pre-configured solutions Tech Data delivers, the company can also work with partners to develop custom proofs of concepts and solutions.
Tech Data’s process to develop commercialized or custom solutions with partners and vendors are delivered through a methodology called The Solution Factory.
After this process is completed, the aggregated solution can be included in the Tech Data IoT and Analytics Solution Catalog. Tech Data offers three levels of solutions (referred to as starter, transformer, and accelerator) to partners, based on the technical expertise and industry acumen required to successfully deliver a given offering. The Solution Catalog lowers partners’ barriers to entry and speeds their time to market by delivering proven solutions focused on specific business outcomesto fulfill their customers’ needs.
The ability for a customer to leverage a pre-integrated and tested solution (or work with a trusted partner to develop one) offers a variety of benefits in terms of speed to market, cost reduction, and risk avoidance. The intensive process Tech Data goes through to ensure each solution component works well together, can scale over time, and has security built in is required for any successful IoT project. Customers that leverage these solutions remove the time it would take for them to go through each of these steps themselves, with no guarantee of success on the first try. They also remove the cost associated with trial and error, and /or developing a solution that fails to scale. Business risk is decreased by relying on a pre-tested solution, especially one that has been vetted for security throughout.
Tech Data enables partners to sell these solutions using their Practice Builder methodology (Figure 3, next page). Tech Data consultants leverage the methodology to maximize partners’ success.
The industrial market, and manufacturing in particular is a key area of focus for Tech Data. The company offers a broad variety of IoT solutions across the entire value chain of manufacturing operations; a sampling of which is provided below: