Maindec looks to woo mid-tier VARs

Third-party services firm looks to fuel growth and claims it offers a better service to the big vendors

Maindec is hoping to tweak the nose of some of the bigger vendors as it looks to show mid-market VARs the worth of working with third-party services providers.

The Buckinghamshire-based outfit has spent the last three years developing its reseller channel and existing partners include integrators Keltec and Blue Chip. But the services player has designs on broadening its footprint in the midmarket, and wants to recruit £10-50m turnover resellers.

Maindec sales manager Andrew Beaumont said: "We want to engage the skill and the capability of the channel more effectively in getting our message to end users. I want to develop our profile and our proposition."

The firm's biggest area of expertise lies with HP technology, and it also works with vendors including IBM, Sun/Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Fujitsu. In its 2011 fiscal year, it banked operating profit of £723,000 on sales of almost £12.5m.

Beaumont claimed the maintenance space has been boosted by the recession, as firms look to get the most out of their IT estates. Some bigger players have backed away from the market, but Maindec is in rude health, he asserted.

"There is an awful lot more focus on maintenance than there was 24 months ago," said Beaumont. "I would say that, in the past couple of years, we have found it very good - we are growing at above the rate of the marketplace."

Beaumont claimed Maindec's responsiveness and UK-based support and engineering operation sets it apart from the services arms of the big vendors.

"As a maintenance company, we are very aware of the potential impact that we can have on the relationship that a reseller has with its end user," he said. "That maturity of our model means we understand, we know what to do, and we have the flexibility to do it. We can respond a lot quicker than the vendors.

"All the top vendors use offshoring. We have all been in a position where we have to use one of those callcentres - it is not the most stress-free half an hour of your life. When it comes to a hardware maintenance contract, we know it is very stressful when the system goes down. If you have a four-hour SLA, the last thing you want is to spend an hour on the phone."