Tech Data aims at year of channel revenue growth

"Building the information technology value added business in resellers markets is important to us in this region," explained Steve Lockie, managing director of Tech Data, "We want to provide, along with the most cost efficient and effective logistics management capabilities in the region, business growth opportunities to resellers through strong technical and marketing support. This initiative is an important vehicle for that."

"The end result that we are seeking is to enable resellers across the region to better service and strongly retain their clients. The market today demands that resellers not only sell information technology products, but understand the underlying technology and be able to support it on end-users' sites," said Lockie. "Build VAR business with Tech Data" develops the expertise of resellers, thus giving them the tools needed to establish profitable and long term relationship with the front end of the market."

The initiative comes at a time when the IT reseller market in the region is coming towards its maturity. The market is being divided between high end-resellers who service the large enterprises' needs for IT products and services, and those who are increasingly focusing their businesses on the small to medium enterprises. "Our market research shows that the majority of the resellers' business growth today comes from the small home office and small to medium enterprise markets," explained Eliot Shepherd, marketing director at Tech Data.

The Tech Data Reseller Research 2001 showed that resellers' revenue generated from walk-in business constitutes 30% of reseller income on average, while the small and home office market constitutes 24% of revenue. A further 26% of average reseller revenue is from the small to medium business market, an area expected to show significant growth in the region over the near future. "With the region's spending on IT hardware and software expected to rise due to the developing nature of the business, the region's resellers' have an untapped opportunity in targeting the small to medium businesses who are today converting to technology based operations," Shepherd said. "With that, resellers around the region need to become specialized in technology areas to be able to advise, implement and support the technologies they sell and this is what we aim to achieve from our year 2002 resellers program."

""Building the Information Technology VAR Business" program of Tech Data will involve technology vendors, the specialized teams of Tech Data and the entire reseller channel in the Gulf and the Levant in on-going knowledge-transfer process that creates more revenue to the entire channel," ended Lockie.

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