Comms chiefs Lister and Priestley depart as Micro-P refocuses

Distributor converges business units and takes a different approach as it looks to further grow comms business

Micro Peripherals' (Micro-P) comms chiefs Alex Lister and Dale Priestley have departed the firm as the distributor revamps its business units to reflect technological convergence in the marketplace.

PBX technologies have now been brought into an infrastructure unit which also houses servers, storage and networking. Comms peripherals are to be moved into Mico-P's mobile communications wing.

The distributor's sales director Paul Bryan told ChannelWeb that the commercial focus of the comms unit, as headed by Lister and Priestley, would be replaced with a more sales-led approach.

"Having comms on its own became not relevant to how we were pitching to the market; we are making it easier for customers to do business with us," explained Bryan. "I am going to be heavily investing in the sales approach."

The sales chief revealed he hoped to double sales headcount in the comms and infrastructure arena. Micro-P's voice-focused sales team in the north and data-focused sales team in the south will now both form part of the expanded Networking Comms Solutions team.

Bryan claimed Lister and Priestley had done a great job in helping build the distributor's comms offering to its current size: £20m-worth of PBX and other comms sales, and a further £40m in networking and infrastructure. The recent addition of Cisco as a vendor partner will help fulfil Micro-P's continuing ambitions to be a big player in the comms arena, said Bryan.

"It is a business which is going great guns," he added. "But we have been doing that possibly a bit too quietly."