Resellers told to avoid Germany and France

Resellers looking to expand into Europe were told last week to avoid Germany and France because the two European markets were overcrowded.

Speaking at Comdef 98, Simon Wallis, sales manager at research firm CompuBase, claimed that because UK resellers and distributors had turned their attentions to opportunities in Germany and France, the market was saturated.

He said resellers would be better off looking at Turkey, Poland and Romania because these markets are under developed, but had similar channel set-ups to the UK market.

Wallis warned resellers that they should use the internet as a means to get into international markets, pointing out that it costs very little to set up a Web site compared with setting up an operation in each European site.

Another way for UK resellers to gain a foothold in mainland Europe was to enter into reseller alliance, where the alliance has a member from each region to represent the group.

Wallis stated that these agreements were advantageous for local resellers to gain global contracts which they previously would have lost out on.

One example of reseller coalition was the Premier Alliance, which has Druid as its UK member. Another example was International Computer Group - a worldwide grouping of big national IBM/Compaq dealers - which has already won a significant amount of international business.

Wallis said: 'The big internationals, like EDS, IBM Global Services and Cap Gemini will not give up this business easily.'