3Com takes partners into small businesses

Networking developer focuses on selling to small companies by launching specialised sales initiative for its resellers

3Com has jumped on the small business bandwagon, launching a programme designed to encourage resellers to target the market.

The networking giant is targeting the Small Business Specialist (SBS) programme at channel partners that specialise in selling networking and technology to small businesses. But 3Com was careful to distance itself from the term small to medium enterprises (SMEs), which it claims is an artificial sector for networking and has brought unnecessary confusion to the market.

In the same week which saw Datamonitor emphasising the importance of the small business market, 3Com was at pains to point out that it intended to concentrate on growth in this area.

Olivier Charon, small business programme manager for 3 Com, said: ?We are moving into the small business market with total support for our business partners. We define small businesses as having between one and 50 employees with less than 20 nodes and no in-house IT support. There are more than 3.5 million small businesses in the UK, 90 per cent of which have fewer than 10 employees. They employ 65 per cent of the total UK workforce and generate more than 57 per cent of total UK gross national product.?

Sales in the small business sector are expected to boom this year. Datamonitor predicted 25 per cent year-on-year growth, with sales expected to reach #350 million by 2000.

3Com?s initiative will work entirely through the channel because it believed that most small businesses prefer resellers and Vars. It will be dedicating sales, product and technical resources to support small business specialists with direct communications into the company as a part of its networking partners programme.

The company will provide training, service, support, and sales and marketing tools, concentrating on generating leads, which will be directly emailed to small business partners.

The programme was greeted with support from the channel. Ian Brooks, MD of IB Business Development, said: ?There has been so much rubbish spoken about this sector over the past few years and it?s good to see a vendor coming to us with what looks like a solid grasp of the market and a good business programme.?

Charles Webb, MD of Multimedia Consultants, said: ?The generating of leads is crucial but so is the general support on networking, marketing and just understanding how a small business works. If 3Com implements it as well as it presents it, it will help enormously.?