I often hear from carriers how Agents don't add value. I'm never sure what value the carriers are talking about. Agents are a sales force for you. We sell your stuff. That's our value. (Some of us do more than that by layering multiple vendors together for a complete solution, but my agent agreement just says I have to sell your stuff to get paid.)
Then the carriers sign up a VAD like Ingram Micro - and I want to scoff loudly. You think Ingram is going to add Value? Please explain to me how that will work, Mr. VP of Channel?
"The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace is a transactional online marketplace for channel partners and IT professionals to educate themselves, browse, buy, deploy and manage a comprehensive suite of cloud services directly from Ingram Micro." [channel vision mag]
Transactional and Automated is not a value add. It's operational efficiency. I guess you could say that is value, but it also makes me laugh. They don't want value -- they want you to sell more of it. (Or at least that's what it appears to be.)