Apricot hits the road with Internet bundle

The newly renamed Mitsubishi Electronic PC Division has introduced an Internet bundle which gives extra points to resellers of Apricot kit.

Hans Sparkes, product marketing manager at Apricot, said the scheme, called Webserver, will benefit resellers with skills to sell the consultancy value-adds.

'We're in harmony with the channel because consultancy is part of the pick and mix,' he said. 'Resellers can purchase from one price list which includes hardware, software and consultancy.'

Apricot will hold a series of roadshows for its dealers towards the end of this month and will provide training, followed by user seminars which resellers can attend.

This means additional margin on servers too, he said. 'All the servers will get a discount except for the minitower. Software and consultancy have full margins.'

Sparkes denied that Compaq and IBM had solutions which had reached the market earlier. In Compaq's case, he said, they supplied the Web software on a disk which gave no opportunity for dealers to add value.

Apricot believes that internal networks using TCP/IP Internet protocols are likely to fuel growth in the sector. Running internal Web sites over secure wires is a far cheaper solution than client/server, Sparkes said.