Since the appointment of R. Govindan as its new CEO last month, Esys has announced two distribution tieups – one with Krone and the other with Microsoft.
During the same period, Redington has announced its tieups with Xerox, Asus for its Intel motherboards, Linksys and Quantum. If you extend the period back to December last year, Redington would also have added Philips and Seagate. Rashi Peripherals became HP’s business notebook partner in February and also has begun distributing IBM servers starting April. Neoteric is reportedly in talks for five-six distribution tieups, including ones with tablet-maker Wacom and French storage device company Lacie.
In contrast, the rest of the distributors have been quiet; announcements of agreements being rare. The last time Ingram Micro made such an announcement was of an alliance with Logitech in December last year. Hitachi GST and Umax selected Cyberstar, with the partnerships being made public again in December last.
Among all these, the alliance that Esys got into with Microsoft and Krone, and Neoteric’s tieup with Wacom stand out.
It’s not just to push products into new geographies, it’s also aimed at a specific niche segment. Esys will be distributing Microsoft’s desktop OS and server apps to the system builder segment, signalling the fact that this segment is far from dying. Krone’s product portfolio is far more high-end – cat 5e/6 cables, 10-gigabit Ethernet and media conversion solutions for the enterprise. For Govindan, this is just the start, and the company now has tieups with close to 20 vendors.
Meanwhile, Neoteric has been building on its strength in the pre-press and photography segments for quite some time – a very focused approach based on a far-sighted view of where the market is moving, and very little opportunism.
It’s good for the tier-two partners too – apart from non-performance, there really seems no reason beyond their control for the distributor to drop them.