Yelton Cautions VARs On Two Trends

During Jeff Yelton's, president of the POS and Barcoding Division of ScanSource, general session speech at the VAD's Partner Conference in Savannah, GA, Yelton spoke to a variety of trends in the marketplace. I followed up his speech with an interview where we talked in greater detail on a couple points of particular interest to the POS community. The first has to do with the virtualization of POS software. This is important because it marks a shift away from the way most VARs are doing business. Indeed, moving POS software from an all-in-one touch computer to the cloud requires significantly thinner hardware. In short, if you think hardware margins were slim now, wait until you're selling what could amount to a monitor and keyboard. Yelton feels the threat goes beyond smaller sales. By simplifying the hardware needed to run a POS system, it becomes a lot easier for a networking VAR to encroach on your business. Yelton's advice? POS VARs should strike first by educating themselves on how they can steal market share from networking VARs.

Yelton also thinks the industry needs to address the issue of used equipment. Specifically, with the number of businesses that have shut their doors (Circuit City alone dumped quite a few barely used terminals on the market), there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of used POS terminals and peripherals waiting to be sold. Yelton doesn't have an immediate answer to this dilemma, but says he's been in discussions on how to handle the situation in a way VARs can benefit.

SOURCE: Business Solutions Magazine