David Frye, Principal at Levantor Capital, and Peter Ward, CEO of Rootsquared, presented “Channel Cloud Challenges and New Financing Solutions” at the Global Technology Distribution Council’s annual EMEA Summit in Noordwijk, Netherlands.

The transition from traditional hardware and software sales to sales of IT as a service, such as cloud computing, has been a major topic for the past several years at the EMEA Summit, the leading gathering in EMEA of vendors and distributors in the information technology sector.


In the presentation, Ward discussed the challenges this transition poses to the IT industry, particularly related to the shift in payment terms from upfront to monthly over time. Ward also highlighted the opportunities for the channel as cloud adoption by the SME sector increases significantly. Rootsquared’s research concluded that to offer IT as a service successfully, the channel needs a simple proposition for SMEs that offers consolidated billing, bundling multiple IT-as-a-service components, including hardware, cloud and managed services. To do so requires new types of channel finance to cover payment term mismatches and manage customer credit risk.

Frye explained how Levantor Cloud Finance can help the channel grow IT-as-a-service sales. “At Levantor, Cloud Finance is an extension of our Sales Finance offering,” said Frye.

David Frye - Levantor

“Levantor’s simple solutions help IT vendors and their channel partners enable sales by providing customers the payment terms they need. Cloud Finance is the same concept. Partnering with cloud providers, distributors and managed service providers, we offer financing and credit risk mitigation to enable the channel to access cloud provider discounts for committed subscriptions (e.g., reserved instances) and offer end customers a better deal, i.e., better price for monthly opex billing. Simplicity is key. Our solutions are a sales tool for the channel designed to have minimal impact on the partner’s relationships and contracts with vendors, cloud providers and end customers”


https://gtdc.org/as-cloud-opportunities-grow-so-does-distributions-value/


About Levantor


Levantor Capital is a FinTech that helps vendors, distributors and channel partners enable sales by providing simple, innovative sales finance programs. Via a panel of global and regional banks, led by Investec Bank plc, Levantor’s programs have financed in excess of EUR300 million in sales to date since going live in March 2017.


About Rootsquared


Rootsquared is a consulting company who specialise in combining insight, innovation and expertise to enable change.