Datrontech creates Hub for SMEs

Distributor Datrontech will move closer to end-users while offering enhanced training, consulting and joint sales initiatives for select VARs, as part of a new programme.

Distributor Datrontech will move closer to end-users while offering enhanced training, consulting and joint sales initiatives for select VARs, as part of a new programme.

Called The Hub, the programme will focus on SMEs and will officially launch on 1 March.

The Hub will be open to about 1,000 of Datrontech's 4,000 VARs and system builders, offering them a tailored programme to grow their business and make sure they survive the next two to three years, according to James Morgan, managing director of Datrontech.

Members of the programme will receive eeb-based training, network strategy assistance, and access to accredited engineers. Datrontech will also help VARs use the government's Technology Means Business (TMB) scheme, to be launched in late spring, which gives small firms access to a national register of TMB-accredited resellers.

Fiona Squire, product marketing director at Datrontech, said: "We may have fallen down on the support side before, but this programme revolutionises how we help our partners and bucks the current trend for distributors to simply act as reactive fulfilment centres."

End-user technical support and remote management of end-user networks are also part of the programme. Morgan insisted that the distributor must move closer to the end-user to understand their solution requirements and assist the VAR in tailoring a package for the SME.

Morgan added: "There is no money in just building PCs any more. The Hub will empower our VARs and help them to evolve into a new and more profitable business. We intend this to be an integrated selling approach, where we can work with a partner from the conception of a customer's network through to the installation."

However, Nigel Judd, channel marketing manager at rival Computer 2000, questioned Datrontech's ability to deliver a total solution. He said it did not have access to enough vendors' products to cater for customers' entire networking needs.

Morgan claimed that Datrontech's strategy for the next few years is to significantly grow the networking business, and more vendor deals are expected. "We will take the pain out of solution sales and these resellers will become Datrontech's future," Morgan said.