SCHd seeks out white space for its vendors

SCH Distribution (SCHd) is expanding its focus to find ‘white space’ opportunities for its vendors, triggered by its recent partnership with Symantec.

The Birmingham-based firm is ‘investing significantly’ in its partnership with the security and storage giant, which officially starts today.

Paul Eccleston, SCH Group director with responsibility for distribution, said: “If you look at our UK portfolio we are in a strong position.”

But he said that there were still a ‘number of gaps’ in areas such as security and storage virtualisation management which Symantec fitted into, and as a result SCHd had identified a number of ‘unique’ areas in which it could work with the vendor.

“Symantec has a very positive channel play,” he said. “It has a broad portfolio and is platform independent and we concluded that there were white space opportunities, where SCHd and its resellers could develop new opportunities in new areas, and the relationship developed very quickly from there.”

Eccleston added that SCHd is recruiting extra staff to form a core Symantec team, and was also training its other specialist vendor teams in the technology.

“However, the white space focus is not just limited to Symantec, we are developing this to find new opportunities for all our vendor partners,” he said.

“This also doesn’t mean we are going to stop doing our volume business, in fact we intend to grow that as well,” he added.

Loay Lawrence, commercial director at VAR Vohkus, said more distributors were looking at the value added model.

“Distributors sit in two camps ­ value add and transactional. Some have crossed the chasm because they realise they are not getting ROI on transactional business, but some have yet to make that change.”