2e2 brand in Prime position
Prime Business Solutions is now rebranded under parent company
VAR Prime Business Solutions has claimed its recent rebranding under the umbrella of parent company
2escape2 (2e2) will allow it to supply an extended offering to its customer base.
2e2 has merged all of its UK businesses – which include Prime, Norsk Data, TriSys, KCC Networks and the Training E-cademy – under the 2e2 brand.
The IT reseller group acquired Prime for £22m in 2004 (CRN, 30 May 2004) and claimed the brand merger aims to increase cross-selling opportunities and raise awareness of the 2e2 brand.
Chris Vick, director of marketing and strategy at Prime, told CRN the merger allows the VAR to operate under a unified identify.
“We will still retain a form of specialisation and take this across to 2e2,” he said. “We are still small enough to be agile, but big enough to be used for managed services.
“The communications environment has changed so dramatically and this rebrand extends our portfolio. We can offer our customer base more data management, such as archiving, availability and virtualisation.”
Vick added that Prime has always been billed as a convergence provider, but said the convergence space has changed so much it is now more about the deployment of applications.
“Convergence was previously about just voice and data, but areas such as storage are now part of it,” Vick said.
Mark McVeigh, chief operating officer at 2e2, said: “As our customers demand more complex and broader solutions, we need to make it easier for them to deal with us. The rebranding will provide a single interface for our range of services. We will not lose any of our agility.”
Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at research firm EuroLAN, said: “As long as 2e2 creates the brand awareness, it will not damage the Prime business. 2e2 will have to be willing to invest to achieve this.”
Humphreys added that the brand merger will make 2e2 – which has operations in Europe – appear to be a pan-European group. He said that this could help to attract vendors that are looking for European coverage to the group.