Acotec changes tack on disties

The vendor's U-turn on the need for distributors has created an opportunity for CHS/Merisel

Acotec sales and marketing director Nick Morse has reopened the door to distributors and is in talks with CHS/Merisel, four months after a self-confessed U-turn on channel policy.

In June, Morse publicly abandoned the two-tier model he had championed as sales manager at Sonix. He has now admitted changing his mind again, as Acotec hopes to sign up a distributor.

The ISDN software vendor maintains that the change in channel policy does not contradict its earlier statement. Morse said the firm will continue to deal direct with its existing Vars. 'We recognised in June that distributors were necessary for those dealing with large volumes, but at that stage we needed to get close to key resellers,' said Morse. 'The remote access market is exploding in the UK and, after halving the price of ISDN for Windows 95 to u200, we need a distributor to fulfil demand.'

A source close to Acotec said the deal with CHS/Merisel was expected to go through by the end of November and had been held up by the distributor's post-acquisition restructure.

Peter Rigby, CHS/Merisel networking divisional manager, confirmed the networking division would be fully operational at the end of November and said the distributor would then be able to give smaller vendors more focus. 'Acotec is particularly interesting because it wraps around Novell and Microsoft products and the remote access market is about to boom.'

Morse stressed that talks had not yet led to a deal. 'The interest in Merisel is due to company structure and past relationships, as Peter and I have worked successfully together before with Sonix. It also has an identified base of dealers that are buying a lot of Microsoft and networking kit,' he said.