Hawk Ridge soars above traditional VAR role
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?
— Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1970
There once was a Golden Age for value-added resellers (VARs). In the business of distributing much-sought-after CAD software, all they had to do was wait for it to be sold nearby and they would get their cut. Then, every year afterward, they would collect maintenance fees. With CAD software being hard to learn, they could also cash in on selling training.
Oh, those were the days.
These days, most designers and engineers have CAD. If they need more licenses, they can bypass the VAR and get those licenses directly from the vendor. If they don’t know how to use a feature, they can Google it or watch a YouTube video — again bypassing the VAR. With VARs no longer guaranteed a cut of every nearby sale, it’s a whole new ball game.
“Anybody can sell to anyone now,” says Cameron Carson, SVP of Engineering at Hawk Ridge Systems, at the inaugural one-day Hawk Ridge Systems Partner Summit recently held in San Francisco. Carson has experienced tectonic shifts in the VAR landscape firsthand. Over the years, the disappearance of sales territories has been bad news for some and good news for others. Some VARs will hang on to the seat they have always enjoyed. Others will gladly remove their seat belts and feel free to move about the cabin. Being one of the bigger VARs, and getting bigger with each acquisition, Hawk Ridge Systems is well positioned to benefit from that freedom.
Not your father’s Hawk Ridge
The Hawk Ridge Systems Partner Summit combines the best of SolidWorks’ annual 3DEXPERIENCE World with the intimacy of a local user group. Instead of dozens of user stories, there’s a curated few with ample time between presentations and a format conducive to getting to know other users.
Attendees come from a diverse number of Silicon Valley firms. Some from big firms “my mother would recognize,” and also small firms doing engineering to order or reverse-engineering work.
It’s unusual for VARs to hold partner summits and invite the media, but Hawk Ridge Systems isn’t your usual VAR. They have taken the traditional role of the VAR and expanded upon it, building upon design and manufacturing services to try to understand design engineers’ business issues.
“We’re not the old Hawk Ridge. We’re not just selling seats of SolidWorks or doing simple PDM implementations,” says Carson, leading off the Summit. We’re looking to see how we can adapt and thrive in this environment alongside you. With the solutions provided we can arrive at that single source of truth. It was 20 years ago when I was in industry and hearing model-based information was right around the corner. We would move from paper to PDFs with a giant vault and BOMs. But we’re still not there yet, and today, engineers and designers are being asked to do more. Software is getting more sophisticated and capable while the IT departments are shrinking.”
Increasingly sophisticated and varied software presents a challenge for design and manufacturing teams. Even for companies as expert in software use as Knapheide (maker of truck bodies with their own presentation), some software is either too infrequently used or comes with such a steep learning curve that it’s best left to specialists.
Knapheide may have expertise in all things SolidWorks, but when it came time to program a custom solution for stacking their truck bodies, they called upon Hawk Ridge Systems. Hawk Ridge Systems’ stacking solution is neatly integrated into the SolidWorks interface and other customizations.
“We have expertise in specialties the design engineers don’t,” says Cameron.
Slow to solve — and why that’s a good thing
Next up is Andrew Parkhurst, who conducts a master class in patience and listening.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes studying the problem and 5 minutes solving it,” Parkhurst attributes this quote to Albert Einstein.
Studying a problem is more than just listening, nodding and taking notes. Parkhurst recommends a letter of understanding (LOU) to capture critical business issues.
“If we don’t take the time to delineate the problem and don’t know what we’re trying to solve, how do we know we’ve solved it?”
Hawk Ridge Systems offers the full breadth of the SolidWorks and Dassault Systèmes portfolio as well as third-party solutions, including HCL CAMWORKS, DriveWorks, 3D printing hardware from FormLabs, HP and Markforged and HP, laser scanners from Artec3D and Creaform, and more. Yet, Parkhurst’s discipline is rock solid. He keeps from blurting out an obvious solution to a business issue, as I would have.
For example, DriveWorks’ design engineers have gone wild with customization requests. Surely, Hawk Ridge Systems will offer them DriveWorks.
Instead, he suggests we help each other.
“Sometimes the solutions can be right in the room,” he says and encourages users to share their issues with each other.
And they do. Company A (a household name we can’t divulge) has an Excel infestation. Company G (another Silicon Valley giant) needs help with version control. Company T initially sourced most of its components but is now bringing its manufacturing in-house. All of them have problems moving data between data islands.
The room has been transformed into a lively discussion of a type not seen at big annual user meetings.
Parkhurst stays in listening mode, the Cheshire Cat that knows the secrets of Wonderland and will share them when the time is right. He sympathizes, repeating the engineers’ problems to assure them he understands.
“With CAD, PDM, PLM, CAM, CRM, ERP … engineers are drinking alphabet soup,” he says.
HI not AI
“How many have undergone an ERP implementation?” Cameron asks later. There’s a shudder in the room. It was not one of the city’s earthquakes.
Selling design and manufacturing software across industries should give Hawk Ridge Systems a unique perspective and insight into the broader world of a company’s business. They would’ve been able to observe what works and what doesn’t, especially among divisions of a company, each with its disparate systems and data silos.
Hawk Ridge Systems, privy to a vast pool of customer data, with a history of observing problems and offering solutions, is HI (human intelligence) over AI, but the concept is the same. Resellers have been deep learning on data, the same as AI does with neural networks. But resellers’ HI has one big advantage. They have seen business bottlenecks and blasted through them with software solutions, either off-the-shelf or custom-made, in a way AI still must learn.
Growing too fast for its own good
“How many companies have growth targets?” asks Parkhurst. All nod. After all, isn’t growth good?
Not necessarily, says Parkhurst. Can a company handle the growth? Are its users sufficiently trained? Can manufacturing scale? The more business systems and processes they have, the better off they are, right?
Not necessarily. Systems and processes can be suffocating. Parkhurst gives an example of a company that was acquired and forced to use the big company’s systems. They had a difficult time of it, Parkhurst states. It hindered their creativity and productivity.
An experts’ expert
The changing market for VARs has led to consolidation. Hawk Ridge Systems has been an active acquirer. “We must have had seven acquisitions,” says Cameron. It’s true. Since 2017, Hawk Ridge Systems has acquired:
- Symmetry Solutions
- Cimtronics Midwest
- Parson Technology
- Quest Integration
- CAS
- Design Point
- Access Manufacturing Systems.
No longer confined to Silicon Valley (where it supports notable tech giants Amazon, Tesla and Google) Hawk Ridge Systems has created a VAR empire that stretches from coast to coast and North to South, with 26 offices in the US and Canada serving 33,000 SolidWorks users.
