'We can't fight gravity', says Acer as it embraces cloud

Vendor is moving into cloud-based products with new business model

Acer's EMEA president says the vendor intends to be the "last man standing" in PCs, despite admitting the market is in a downward spiral and talking of the need to attack elsewhere.

The Taiwanese vendor announced this year that it will split the company into two divisions.

The "core business group" will focus on laptops, desktop computers, tablets and research and development, whereas the "new business team" will concentrate on smartphones, wearables and the "bring your own cloud" service.

EMEA president Emmanuel Fromont told CRN: "The idea behind the split was if we could have those two engines running for the company, then the company is healthy.

"We are a PC company and that is our core business. We are going to defend that, we will be the last man standing. We also understand that there is not much we can do against gravity; the PC market keeps declining."

Acer announced its focus on a new "bring your own cloud" business model at its conference in New York this week.

CEO Jason Chen described the new model as being "based on a vertical business model of intelligent, connected devices."

Fromont added: "I think there is huge potential around IoT and around cloud for us."

Acer also said at the conference that it was aiming to increase the amount of business through the commercial side with the launch of new business products including the Chromebook 14.

Fromont said that in EMEA about 20 per cent of business was from the commercial side, and that all commercial business was done through the channel.

"We have always been channel-centric. It is a very important part of our model because it also allows us to be cost efficient," he said.

Acer currently has around 1,800 to 2,000 partners in the UK, working with distributors including Ingram Micro and Exertis.

"We are trying to grow our reseller partners," said Fromont. "We are happy with our resellers, we have a good partnership with all of them. But we are very big in consumer, we are smaller in commercial in general so there is a lot of potential for us to expand and grow."

Acer is in the process of relaunching its partner programme in the UK, which Fromont said includes access to the refreshed partner portal. It has also relaunched its rewards scheme, with benefits based on partner turnover.

Fromont added: "We want to make sure the resellers understand our value proposition. If you look at the reality of our portfolio, we have a full line of commercial products.

"We need to make sure we do enough to train and make sure they understand the value and the richness of the portfolio, so we still have some work to do there."