Smith gains top European job at Omtool

Northamber's former commercial director Paul Smith has joined fax software developer Omtool as part of his quest to return to work for a vendor.

Smith resigned from Northamber on 8 January after a four-year stint (PC Dealer, 13 January). He was appointed as European managing director of Omtool and has been brought in to restructure and expand the company's European channel operation.

Speaking exclusively to PC Dealer, Smith said: 'Joining Omtool was a good opportunity for me. It's a great company from a people point of view, there is so much that needs doing and tremendous potential for growth. It's also a lot more fun than distribution.'

He admitted that Omtool's European channel policy was in disarray, as it comprises of a mixture of direct and indirect selling. But Smith added he would be changing the channel structure throughout Europe.

'We are going to take Omtool into 100 per cent channel operations by 1 May,' Smith said. 'We aim to appoint two volume distributors for our lower-end products, two value-added distributors for our enterprise fax products, one pan-European distributor and one local distributor for each section, and an AS/400 specialist for our AS/400 range.'

Smith joined Northamber in 1995 as divisional manager before being promoted to commercial director in March 1996 and onto its main board a year later.

He was responsible for setting up the CTI arm at Northamber, alongside running the networking and AS/400 divisions.

Prior to working at Northamber, Smith had owned a Var, which he sold to Erskine House in 1995 for a substantial amount of money.

Omtool is a Nasdaq-listed business and has been operating in Europe for two years. The company develops network fax, document management and workgroup software packages.