Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Julius Berger - The Evolving Role of Alliances and Distribution
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Julius Berger, Senior Director and Head of Corporate Mid-Market at Fujitsu (soon to be Fsas Technology), for a candid and deeply insightful conversation on what it really takes to evolve a channel strategy, especially when it means saying goodbye to the familiar.
Julius shares the story behind Fujitsu’s strategic pivot from a broadline, volume-focused model to a highly targeted, solution-driven channel approach. We explore what it takes to realign your entire partner ecosystem, the emotional complexity of ending long-standing partnerships, and how building with transparency and empathy creates the foundation for new, high-value relationships.
From championing solution selling and embracing partner individuality to redefining the distributor’s role in an AI- and services-led future, Julius offers practical lessons and honest reflections. Plus, he opens up about balancing a demanding channel career with life as a father of three, and why clear communication is his ultimate leadership superpower.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating change in the channel, building for scale, or aiming to lead with both strategy and heart.
Connect with Julius: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julius-berger/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, julius. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Hi, thank you. Thank you for joining me today in this channel podcast. I'm doing really really well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. I think Fujitsu has a really interesting background and a really interesting channel story and I'm excited to get into how you've helped steer some of that strategy within your region. But maybe for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:thank you for that yes, um, as you said, my name is julius berger. I'm working for fritsu. Uh, more or less 15 years now, I'm still happy at fritsu. We are a global it company that focused on channel business, especially in Germany and the whole Europe. I'm a senior director and head of corporate mid-market and I'm heading the partner, or key partner management. The sales division has current around 65 person or employees and, yeah, you can say that I learned the channel business from the peak up and I'm convinced that the key to success lies in good, loyal cooperation with partners and customers in equal terms. And, um, what anything else? So, away from work, I'm a family man and I enjoy the time with my three little sons and my wife, which helps me a lot in the hectic IT industry and never lose the ground.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, three little boys, I can imagine that is somewhat challenging. I currently have a four-month-year-old son. Congratulations to that yeah yeah, so experiencing just how challenging one is three sounds both exciting and maybe slightly terrifying, but they're older than four months, and for four months you have really big eyes, so congratulations.
Speaker 2:Awesome, maybe tackling something slightly easier than parenting, which I think is channel strategy. We were speaking in our prep call around a really interesting shift that Fujitsu made being a very sort of different channel model from going from sort of quite wide and broad line and high volume to much more high value, very focused on sort of channel success. That is a transition lots of businesses attempt, most fail and I think even if you are successful, it can be really challenging rebuilding that channel architecture. I'm sure you have a thousand stories, but talk me through how that transition has been. I'm sure you have a thousand stories, but talk me through how that transition has been to be honest, both it was exciting and exhausting.
Speaker 2:So transition from a complete.
Speaker 1:We're talking about channel right, not parenthood the transition from a complete IT provider to more or less data-centric company was a challenge, but for us it was no alternative because we can see from the current economic data where Germany is in a recession, it is growing, but in Bitcoin, the ITK industry say that the business will grow around 4 or 5%. The growth is driven mainly by the infrastructure segment and the new technology around AI and in this next sequence, we are going to call it from the 1st of April 2025, no longer FUJITSU, we call called to the FSAS Technology GmbH and we remain 100% FUJITSU subsidiary but focus exclusively on technologies and solutions. And it's clear that this transformation of the company was not only technological but also changed the structure of the partner network. It was painful that we had to separate ourselves from partners, from some partners. We had focused primarily on the client business.
Speaker 1:In such a situation, it's, above all, important to have transparency for all those individuals and for those who are involved, because we have informed our partners in a timely and open manner.
Speaker 1:We have this Japanese truth and loyalty and this kind of stuff and open manner and explained our motives. While this has hurt most of the affected partner, it's entirely understandable from an economic perspective. So for our data center partners, with whom we continue to work, it's important that we provide value at high quality data center solutions for both sides that meet the complex customer requirements to 100% at least 100%. This includes not only having products and solutions such as servers, storage devices in your portfolio, an extensive range of services, press and post sales offerings, consulting services and everything you need to be successful in this complex data center market. And if you want to survive in this data center market, you have to offer visionary and future-oriented solutions. Thanks to our GNI solutions, our private GPT applications, our new developed ARM processor Monaca I don't know if you've heard of it, no, I haven't for the market our supercomputer K2 and all the other strong topics we sell, we meet the expectation and trust of our partners and customers.
Speaker 1:We have an alliance partner network with some software solutions that enable us to customize our product. So the manufacturing part, so the really individual stuff, with the largest force of any IT manufacturer in the market and at F-SUS Technology, formerly known as Fuyitsu I try to convince myself about this, or trying to get use of the new name Every customer and partner has this personal contact to quickly find a solution. I think this is the most important stuff and we rely on people in doing business at the end of the day, and we invested several million euros in the new branding training on our partners and convinced them that they yeah, hopefully we are a part of our journey.
Speaker 2:Maybe the bit that I sort of want to double click on and get slightly into. You touched on the sort of Japanese mandate around sort of honesty, integrity, loyalty. But it must have been a very tough sort of must have been a very tough conversation to have with so many partners that, hey, we're changing our strategy. Maybe you're not well aligned to our strategy anymore. How did it feel to have those conversations? What are sort of some of the stories that you can share in terms of how to handle maybe some of those difficult conversations in a way that is productive and helpful but still honest To?
Speaker 1:be honest, you're going out of your comfort zone. It's not a good feeling. It's a bad feeling to start with the conversations, but as a salesperson you're used to it, you have to be used to it. So it's not nice, but it could be nice and I want to share one example. We have a local partner. It's not the biggest one, they have 20, 40 employees, more or less, and they are sitting in the south of Germany. Their name is Systemhaus Ulm, and the head of sales and myself are friends.
Speaker 1:I would say and, and and I. I pick up the phone and say hey, toby, we have to meet, we have to, to, to to handle a topic. We, we are exiting the ccd business. You say, wow, what the fuck are you kidding me? It's the first of april or what, or something like that. I say, unfortunately not, but I want to see your face and make it face to face orface or eye-to-eye contact for that. And when we talk about this, how we should proceed further. And he said, yeah, we are too small to focus on two manufacturers, so we can say our technical and sales stuff and our customer. We can focus on Fritz, because we're getting every one-stop shopping thing Now. We cannot do this. And we were a little bit sad and say, ah, fuck, but in private we can meet and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:And his boss came around, the CEO of this company. He said hey Julius, hey Toby, why are you looking so sad? And we say, yeah, maybe we have to stop our business relationship. He said I don't think so. Have you ever heard about this private GPT stuff? We have GPT for sure. He said, yeah, we have a university and a professor who makes this LLM stuff, and then you have the server and we will build the user interface and maybe we take this stop to build something new, something more value, something not me too a really special stuff. And this was, in my opinion for sure. It was not every conversation in this end, to be honest, alex, it was a really, really nice story, in my opinion, to see what change could be. And if one door is closed, a window will be open or a new room will enter.
Speaker 2:What I really like about that story is that it's really painful to have some of those conversations right, and I know a lot of maybe weaker salespeople might hide behind an email or a quick phone call. But you've taken the time to really sit down and and have that sort of painful but direct conversation and in doing that I I'm sure it didn't happen 100 at the time but in doing that you've managed to to sort of maintain a relationship, build a new proposition. It sounds like that partner's being valuable today, hence why you reference them. Uh, and so it's. It's great to see that, like you say, you close the door and a window opens. That's the value of partnerships right is is we can find a new way to continue to be successful together.
Speaker 1:One of the will be going better and better. So the first time hurts a lot and the second partner conversation is getting better, and the third and the fifth and tenth and sometimes the department, the partners, say, yeah, sure, it's okay, be loyal and let's go further and let's focus more on data center and you are loyal and good company, fritzu. I'm celebrating 19th birthday this year, so 19 years, not plenty more.
Speaker 2:So maybe, pivoting to, one of the other things that I I know lots of people in your position have to encourage and and encourage and incentivize and educate partners is to shift into a solution selling mode. Right, it's part of our jobs to um, and it's something I spend a lot of time doing, educating partners in in the market on. Hey, here is ways that you can optimize your business, and certainly shifting to a solution sales approach is one of those. How have you encouraged that partner behavior? How do you encourage and sort of drive your partners to step up to a new level in sales motion?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the transition from pure product sales to orchestration or complex IT solution is an important step for partners to remain competitive with the freezing solution. This does not happen overnight, for sure. This is a process and a way to go, but through a continuous process of further education together with Fritzu, maybe that could be successful for the most of the partner who focus on expanding their consulting service competencies and not only sell products and not only the customer says something and you will deliver. So maybe develop complete customer-specific solutions and then enrich with their individual core competences their superpower, if you want to call it like this.
Speaker 1:You have to recognize the value of a holistic approach that focuses on solution and services, unique selling propositions for the partner, increasing their loyalty of the customers and, by the way, also increasing their profitability for them, for the customer and for Fujitsu, to be honest. So we are just for that. We also want to earn money and give our employees a stable and successful environment where they want to stay.
Speaker 2:Well that you know that ultimately, we talk a lot about this on the podcast, but that, ultimately, is what channel is about right Creating a win-win-win. How does the customer win, how does the partner win, how does the distributor win, how does the vendor win? And certainly, you know, one of the things that I'm a real fan of seeing is when people build a managed service or they build a wraparound that is truly unique, because part of building a unique selling point or a unique value proposition is understanding who you are going to sell to, but actually, more importantly in some ways, who you're not going to sell to, right? So if your technology is hey, we help football clubs with stadiums of 40,000 and above awesome, that's great. You know exactly what you're doing. You build your value prop about that, you build your sales motion and it's really easy to tangibly go after that business. I see so many partners trying to sell lots of product to lots of types of company and that's just a race to the bottom, right. That's a really painful world to be in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, 100% agree, 100% agree. It's not an or I think it's an end. There we go, and 100% with you. It's only a good deal if every person on the table are a winner. It's not that one is profiting and the other one is paid. This is not a good deal in our opinion.
Speaker 2:I completely agree. One of the things I'm extremely biased I always call out because I was born in distribution. I've run distribution strategy for amia, for zoom, and I think distributors have traditionally played an awesome role in how channels are built. I also think the world is changing as sort of marketplace happens and businesses have more mechanisms to go direct. I still think there's a huge amount of value in what distribution can do, but I love to hear lots of people's perspective in terms of what do you see as the future role of distributors and how they can maximize that value.
Speaker 1:The IT distribution plays a central role in supporting the sales of AI and cloud services in Germany and through targeted measures and service, the distributor can effectively support manufacturers, resellers and system integrators and end customers. I think he's the spider in the net, maybe? Yeah, call it like this the distributor. We work with our evolving from a pure sales channel and logistics specialist to a value-add solution-oriented partner for reseller and system integrator for the following topics. So extending the partner range, for example, so you can use a much broader sales force as we can afford to have for our own, and they are the best player to win new partners for our solutions, for sure they are.
Speaker 1:The next thing, I think, is trainings and workshops and certification programs, and our distributor can provide training for resellers to provide them with the necessary know-how to effectively implement the core market of Fujitsu. The workshops are important, I think. For example, our distributor Bytec restarted 13 years ago. Bytec enabled their partners to doing the service for Fuyutsu. So then customers buy a service pack. The machine broke or fell to the bottom and the partner can make the maintenance, so not an external partner. Go to your and BITIC train our partners. They started in 2012, I think until 2015, with 1,500 service partners at show Only for BITIC, that was really a great achievement for us.
Speaker 2:That was really a great achievement for us, and so distribution has played a key role. It's actually one of the things that I think is so often misunderstood about what distribution is best at, and, to be honest, to me, that's partner acquisition, partner activation, partner enablement. Right that you want your… In a traditional way? Yes, for sure, but if you look at the distributions, at this point.
Speaker 1:Partner activation, partner enablement right that you want your, you want your additional way? Yes, for sure. But if you look at the disciplines at this point, especially in jockey, for example, ingram micro, they, they provides platforms it's vantage, I think it's called it and simply access to different cloud platforms and ai solutions. Sure, they have the strength in finance and leasing models and flexible payment and billing models and based on consumption-based models, for example, but they're much more than, if you look, I don't know, 5 or 10 or 15 years ago. Sure, they're much more than logistic and they're much more than financial partners. They're really a spider on the net. They are the platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the piece that I really sort of view where distributed they are there to to make servicing customers as easy as humanly possible, right, whether, like you say, that's billing platforms and marketplaces and enablement and training tools and all of it it's how do we make it so that as many partners have the infrastructure if I can say it like that of a Beckler right, that we have the supporting architecture around, and I speak to loads of partners that are 20, 30 people and 20 years ago, if I said, hey, do you have this ability and this technology and this no? And yet the distributor is almost raising the floor of those smaller partners to be able to compete in a similar way than you know, the biggest, best companies.
Speaker 1:They are making it bigger and more superpower in this individual and then make it brighter for sure. I think when we talk about this AI and platform and all the cool new stuff, what we often forget is behind every AI and behind every cloud solution are high-performance servers. They have fail-safe storage devices, network infrastructure and much more. That is essential, and the distributor can handle both worlds and can deliver the holistic solution for every partner. That's the reason why Fujitsu has invested heavily in the development of the distribution models in recent years to support distributors. Their role is value-added partners and provide technology, platform and market leaders and products and solutions, and they're more important than ever and my personal point of view is they are getting. This party will rock on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree. I'm very bullish on where I think distribution will continue to sort of innovate and add value. I think I have one final one for you, and I think it's the part of the market that I find most interesting, which is alliances how sort of two parallel businesses work together to build better together solutions for partners and for customers, and how you sort of knit not just the product but the actual go-to-markets together in a very sort of synergistic way. And I know you, Fujitsu and NetApp have traditionally worked together for a long time. In fact, I think you're about to introduce us to someone within their business on the podcast as well, so that's great from a messaging perspective. Talk me through how you build that better together. Go to market with an alliance.
Speaker 1:First greetings to any the partnership with NetApp is one of central importance to us and a clear, I think. 25 years of successful story and the collaboration with NetApp enable us to offer our custom, innovative storage solutions that are perfectly adapted to the requirements and increasingly data-driven world. With Fujitsu, netapp company benefits from a strong alliance based on decades of experience in technologies. And FUJITSU is one of the five largest IT service providers worldwide and covers the entire spectrum of data center solutions and services, and more than one, I think. One and a half thousand certified FUJITSU experts ensure that the customer can benefit from this technology.
Speaker 1:And NetApp is the largest independent storage and data management company, delivering industrially leading technologies from flash to object storage to scale out solutions to backup and cloud services, and their leadership position the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Storage underlines the innovative power of NetApp solution.
Speaker 1:Together, fujitsu and NetApp offer first-class partnerships.
Speaker 1:This alliance enables the seamless integration of state-of-the-art technology and thus creates sustainable added value for the business of the customers.
Speaker 1:The benefits from FUJITSU NetApp really to bring in a nutshell is Fritzu support in German for the German partners, the network of Fritzu pre-sales professionals available for projects, over 60 service specialists for maintenance, installation and managed service, all-around partner program, joint sales and marketing initiatives, everything from a single source from server to network to NetApp storage, including server branded NetApp support for data solution, training and supports, and Fuyitsu supports this knowledge acquisition, and 80% of all NetApp support packs are sold by Fuyitsu technicians, so I think 80% is a lot For sure, to be honest. Furthermore, if a private quote is allowed, it also makes a lot of fun with them to work, to speak. They're cool characters and I think this is also important for the channel. It's all about the people, and the people by NetApp are cool and they are open and they are reliable, and I think this is really a good fit Awesome people and the people by NetApp are cool and they are open and they are reliable and then I think this is a really good fit and awesome. So for working, it has to be fun.
Speaker 2:That I completely agree with. Maybe now I can be really cheeky and ask a bit of personal advice. A bit of personal advice. I take my career sometimes a bit too seriously and work ungodly hours sometimes. But you've you opened the sort of recording with. You're a family man, and family is important to you. As I mentioned, I have a four month year old, so sometimes I get a little bit stressed that maybe I work too much and I'm I'm not present or not home enough. Talk me through how you balance being a channel leader and having a successful career while having a big family. That's important to you.
Speaker 1:Successful career. This is a question and I would after life. I always managed to find a good balance between the career and the general world, who is so fast and so sometimes exhausting, but it makes so fun that it don't feel like work sometimes. But to integrate the family life in this fast and enormous speed is hard and as a father of three children they're, to be honest, a little bit older than four months and four years and seven years and 10 years, so they're sleeping sometimes.
Speaker 1:This is a challenge, but that experience also helped me in the past to set my priorities clear and make myself aware of what really matters and at the end of the day, I don't think that it's all about numbers and bringing the next channel partner to the top or make your boss more happy. Also, my biggest lesson was that clear communication and a strict planning and discipline are the key to success. My personal point of view, especially in a professional role like we have, which is often associated with high targets and a lot of travel effort, you have to control very consistently how you divide your time, your time, and it's important to take both professional family obligations seriously, and it's only work if we communicate openly and transparently to everyone, to your family, to your children, to your boss, to your colleagues, to your employees, to your partners, to your distributors. It's all about communication and, to be clear, I've learned that realistic expectations are clearly fine when I'm available for my children and when I'm available for work, and don't mix it too much up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you try and draw those hard lines between work and family, which I think, yeah, I try and instill. It's a theory. Yeah, it's always challenging. So we spoke about alliances. Alliances are important on this podcast because we always ask our current guests to recommend our next guests. Julius, who do you have in mind?
Speaker 1:I think we talk about the family and I'm not sure if I can bring them to your fabulous podcast, but we also talk about NetApp, so I I would be really interesting. And then and hearing Henning Rahe from NetApp. He's setting the channel business in Germany and then he's a really cool guy and I think makes fun to to talk with him for you and I'm sure that your audience will appreciate this.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, we've already reached out to Henning and he is definitely coming on soon, so we appreciate both the introduction and your time today, julius. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, Alex.