Trisys establishes distribution arm

Trisys, the Luton-based corporate reseller of storage and high-end back-up products, has started a trade-only distribution arm under the banner Aquarius Distribution.

The company has said that Aquarius will focus on selling digital linear tape (DLT) and digital audio tape (DAT) back-up systems to the reseller channel.

Aquarius joint managing director Richard Jackson said: ?Instead of starting off with a distribution outfit and spinning out a reseller arm, we?ve done the reverse.?

The new company has only one supplier at present ? Advanced Digital Information Corporation ? but it is in search of other storage manufacturers.

?We are talking to a number of tape vendors, particularly for a quarter-inch tape, and we?ll be going over to Comdex in November to look at new products,? said Jackson.

He explained that the company had no desire to operate in the disk drive market, as margins were too low. ?Disk drives margins are below five per cent at the moment and we do not want to operate a company on that basis.?

Aquarius has three full-time staff. Although it shares the same premises with Trisys, it will be run as a separate entity.

According to Jackson, Aquarius was up and running within a week and has already paid for itself within one month of trading.

Trisys and Aquarius are both jointly owned by Richard Jackson and Bram de Groot. Both have been in the data storage industry for 10 years. Before establishing Trisys in 1991, they worked at Raab Karcher Distribution subsidiary Memec. Jackson was with Memec?s Ambar Systems for 18 months and then at Thame Systems; De Groot was at Ambar for 18 months.