E92 Plus aims parting shot at Hummingbird

Distributor E92 Plus has hit back at claims from enterprise software vendor Hummingbird that it was booted out of its distribution tier because it was selling direct to users.

Hummingbird recently severed E92 Plus from its list of distributors, ending a 10-year relationship. Chris Roper, country manager for Hummingbird UK, said at the time that the move from four to three distributors would remove confusion over the vendor's pricing model.

But E92 Plus has strongly denied that it had been approaching users directly.

Mukesh Gupta, managing director of E92 Plus, said: "We are a genuine value-add, trade-only distributor. We've put a lot of work into Hummingbird and we helped to make it what it is today in the UK. It was a mutual agreement to go our separate ways, but we don't sell direct to users." Gupta claimed that the vendor's channel policy had lacked clarity. "The fact is that Hummingbird actively sells direct as well, and competes with its channel. I don't think it knows its own channel."

He added that the distributor had no intention of maintaining its links with Hummingbird by becoming a reseller.

Roper maintained that E92 Plus' link with users was behind the split, and indicated other factors were involved, but refused to elaborate.

He added: "Perhaps our channel was not as easy and as clean as it should be, but now we present a much cleaner image to our user base as well as to our corporate resellers."