D&H Distributing Ramps Up and Formalizes Professional Services

D&H’s Tiffany Ward

D&H Distribution on Thursday introduced D&H Professional Services led by recent hire, Tiffany Ward. The new professional services initiative formalizes and enhances existing offers and debuts one new services category – Managed Services.

D&H investment in beefing up its services got underway about a year ago. The distributor brought in Ward as director of professional services in August. Structurally, D&H’s Cloud Business Unit is now the D&H Cloud and Services Business Unit.

D&H’s Jason Bystrak

“Tiffany brings a lot of services experience and distribution experience,” said Jason Bystrak, vice president, cloud and services business unit at D&H.  “She is the culmination of some of the planning we’ve done over the last 12 months and where we want to take our services business.”

A Closer Look

The distributor is focusing on these three areas of professional services: White Glove and Integration Services, Managed Services and Project Services. This is the beginning, more will follow.

White Glove and Integration Services are not new to D&H partners. What partners will notice is the expansion from activation and enrollments, especially for Google Chromebooks in K-12, to scaling-up to provide additional device enrollment, asset tagging, laser etching of hardware, and on-site assessments. As the pandemic drives up demands, especially in verticals such as education, fulfilling opportunities for Chromebook and device management deployments in the classroom is getting a welcomed boost.

D&H will offer comprehensive help desk services, plus a combination of hardware from top-tier manufacturers such as Lenovo and HP bundled with vital software and security services. The objective is to create turn-key solutions that add value for the end-user. And, customers can be pay via a monthly license.

“We’ll be expanding that further with investments in Microsoft’s autopilot program,” said Bystrak. “This is technology from Microsoft that allows for the remote application of licensing assignment and registration of devices, simplifying the process.”

New Managed Services

A new Managed Services offering will roll out in spring 2021. It will include five managed services: device management, device security, infrastructure management (data center services and network devices), infrastructure security and help desk services.

D&H will have technical consultants to help partners put together statements of work and SLAs using D&H’s managed services. Partners can white label the services and attach to the devices and infrastructure they sell. The goal is to help VARs kick-start a managed services and recurring revenue practice.

“I look at these managed services two ways. If you’re a VAR and you want to get into managed services you don’t have to hire a bunch of people to do it. You can partner with D&H and we’ll arrange the backend for those managed services to happen for you. If you’re an MSP who buys from D&H, we can give you additional scale.”

D&H already trains VARs on how to build an MSP practice, sell managed services and operate the practice.

More Formalization

D&H will be expanding and formalizing its existing project services capabilities in areas such as ProAV, Esports, cloud, data center and network infrastructure, and security.

New offerings include assessments, migrations, and on-site installation and setup services, post-sale support and break/fix. As with all D&H professional services, VAR and MSP partners can leverage D&H to augment their technical skills, geographic reach and scale by branding these project services as their own.

Looking Ahead

Bystrak gazed into his crystal ball for 2021 for us and shares what he sees for the next year.

Remote work and education will continue after the pandemic is over. He expects to see a continued adoption of technologies that support remote workers.

The need for security will continue to be strong throughout the new year. “People are constantly finding new ways to breach technology. We’ll be offering security solutions in our managed services,” he said.

Esports, which is unique to D&H, is expected to grow in the education vertical.

And cloud as a delivery model will grow as more technology is delivered in the cloud. “Whether you’re talking about software or security solutions delivered via the cloud, or you’re seeing more companies move workloads to the cloud such as Microsoft Azure.”