Becoming a value added reseller

[cyberguy]

Say I wanted to sell enterprise resource planning (software) and start my own company from scratch how hard would it be for me to become a VAR for one of the big ERP vendors out there? And can someone clarify what the difference between a VAR and affiliate is.

How much money do you think I will need to start up a ERP company? Can I start off by myself and then slowly grow it or will i have to prove to vendors I am financially secure before I can start reselling?

Thanks

 

[BOS]

Hi. What experience and success can you prove. Have you a list of buyers.

 

[Kixo]

a lot of ERP is big business, so big businesses will want to work with other big businesses. Some of the first questions they will ask will be who else do you look after or who else have you migrated etc, so i think experience and names will be a big one in that. I know a few people doing well out of ERP consultancy, then the next step for them would be to jump from consultant to company with staff.

VAR is value added reseller, so bespoke in house programming or support/experience, affiliate is more fire and forget...... ok maybe not that simple!

I think trying to take on some of the big boys from scratch would need either HUGE numbers in marketing and solid staff who know their stuff or a REALLY good contact list

 

[Phil Richardson]

The big IT companies are also having a shake up of their channel and getting rid of the smaller/unprofitable resellers.

As has been said above setting up an ERP business would be a massive undertaking. Saying that I do know of people who have set up Microsoft CRM and Navision companies. None of these were one man bands though, they all had a few partners that understood sales, implementation, development etc.

One good company was AXmentor who came at it from a slightly different perspective, they helped companies implement the software when they were having difficulties with the existing VAR. From this they moved into the sales side once they had proved themselves to Microsoft.

We do lead generation for a lot of ERP and software companies so see the difficulties they go through, not least in the length of both the marketing and sales cycle which can be many months before you generate any cash.