Former Ideal trio bank on consultancy

Three former Ideal Hardware board members have teamed up again, resulting in this week's launch of storage firm Source Enterprise Consulting.

The company is the brainchild of Richard Russ, Matthew Wiltshire and Jason Rabbetts, who all sat on the now defunct operational board of Ideal.

Source Enterprise is focused on services, with 40 per cent of revenue expected to come from this area, but it will also supply products sourced from Ideal.

Russ, Wiltshire and Rabbetts left the distributor in March, before the restructure and staff cull of 96 employees. The idea for the company came from their time at Ideal, where the importance of enterprise storage to businesses became increasingly obvious.

Jason Rabbetts, commercial director at Source Enterprise, said: "We found there was an increasing interest from companies wanting strategies for their storage systems, while it was becoming more difficult to get the manufacturer's message across. There aren't many resellers out there that can provide a consultative storage strategy - we realised there was an opportunity for a company that could."

Source Enterprise is keeping close ties with Ideal, with the distributor being one of its main suppliers. Source's offices are based in Tolworth, the location of Ideal's former headquarters in Surrey.

Matthew Wiltshire, operations director at Source Enterprise, said: "While we're not in the same business, we would hope to emulate the success that Ideal had during its time there."

Source Enterprise is looking to partner with a number of key vendors in the storage market, but Rabbetts stressed that any consultancy will be vendor independent.