Get Your Share Of The Stimulus Package
Jeff Yelton, president of ScanSource POS & Barcoding, talks about the channel and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (i.e. federal stimulus package) in an exclusive interview with Business Solutions magazine President Jim Roddy.
Download Podcast (right click on link to download)
Length: 14 min, 25 sec
Yelton: You hear of this huge number of $787 billion just getting ready to flow out into the economy, and that just makes everybody salivate. And then you hear the president talk about how he wants to focus on healthcare and technology and infrastructure, and I think at lot of the VARs think that there is a lot of opportunity – and there is. The biggest problem that we found is trying to dissect and dive through and read through that plan to try to determine where the actual dollars are.
You have to look at the details, because inside of it there are places where there’s $19 billion which is going into healthcare IT technologies all the way down to $600 million going into IT technologies for schools. There’s even approximately $500 million going into IT technology on Indian reservations around healthcare.
At ScanSource what we decided from talking to our VARs is that most of our VARs don’t really know how to find the dollars, and then even if they did find where the dollars are, a lot of them have not interacted with the federal, state, and local governments before, and so that procurement process is very different.
So what we decided to do is come up with something we’ve branded as GovSource. It’s basically broken up into four different areas:
• help VARs identify the opportunity
• generate leads for VARs – find where the grants are actually being written
• make sure they know how to interact with the government
• a component of our ISV program will provide software to round out the overall solution
BSM: That money isn’t all flowing out right now. This is going to be a long-term opportunity for a lot of these resellers where it’s not going to end in 2009 or early 2010. This could help sustain their business for several years, so it’s not too late to catch this wave.
Yelton: Absolutely. The last number I heard, only 18-20% of the stimulus dollars have actually been released. Most people are in this grant-writing stage right now, and the information that I’ve found is that the majority of the money will actually not start flowing until 2010 and run into 2011 because most of the projects will be more than a year long. There’s at least 24-36 months of benefits that our VAR community can take advantage of this program.
I’d give them (VARs) advice in two areas. One, educate yourself. Don’t go jump in on any bid process that comes out. And then the second thing I would say is in some cases you might actually need to go and partner with somebody that has done this before and started the procurement processes of the state or federal government, whichever group that you’re going after.
This is only a portion of this exclusive interview. For the complete podcast, go to the media player at the top of this page.
For more insight from Jeff Yelton, check out his blog at www.jeffsvarblog.com.
Download Podcast (right click on link to download)
Length: 14 min, 25 sec
Yelton: You hear of this huge number of $787 billion just getting ready to flow out into the economy, and that just makes everybody salivate. And then you hear the president talk about how he wants to focus on healthcare and technology and infrastructure, and I think at lot of the VARs think that there is a lot of opportunity – and there is. The biggest problem that we found is trying to dissect and dive through and read through that plan to try to determine where the actual dollars are.
You have to look at the details, because inside of it there are places where there’s $19 billion which is going into healthcare IT technologies all the way down to $600 million going into IT technologies for schools. There’s even approximately $500 million going into IT technology on Indian reservations around healthcare.
At ScanSource what we decided from talking to our VARs is that most of our VARs don’t really know how to find the dollars, and then even if they did find where the dollars are, a lot of them have not interacted with the federal, state, and local governments before, and so that procurement process is very different.
So what we decided to do is come up with something we’ve branded as GovSource. It’s basically broken up into four different areas:
• help VARs identify the opportunity
• generate leads for VARs – find where the grants are actually being written
• make sure they know how to interact with the government
• a component of our ISV program will provide software to round out the overall solution
BSM: That money isn’t all flowing out right now. This is going to be a long-term opportunity for a lot of these resellers where it’s not going to end in 2009 or early 2010. This could help sustain their business for several years, so it’s not too late to catch this wave.
Yelton: Absolutely. The last number I heard, only 18-20% of the stimulus dollars have actually been released. Most people are in this grant-writing stage right now, and the information that I’ve found is that the majority of the money will actually not start flowing until 2010 and run into 2011 because most of the projects will be more than a year long. There’s at least 24-36 months of benefits that our VAR community can take advantage of this program.
I’d give them (VARs) advice in two areas. One, educate yourself. Don’t go jump in on any bid process that comes out. And then the second thing I would say is in some cases you might actually need to go and partner with somebody that has done this before and started the procurement processes of the state or federal government, whichever group that you’re going after.
This is only a portion of this exclusive interview. For the complete podcast, go to the media player at the top of this page.
For more insight from Jeff Yelton, check out his blog at www.jeffsvarblog.com.
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