Former Tech Data trio join new Beta Distribution AV arm

New firm will be headed up by Joel Chimoindes

Three former Tech Data employees have joined Beta Distribution's new audiovisual arm.

Joel Chimoindes joins Beta Digital Media Solutions (Beta DMS) as managing director, and is joined by fellow ex-Tech Data colleagues Graeme Little and Craig Chester, who will take on the sales director and technical director roles respectively.

Completing the management team are commercial director Brian Ebury, who has been at Beta for 11 years, and AV specialist Ian Strange.

Last week Beta Distribution marketing director Nigel Morris told CRN that the new firm has been formed to tackle the increasing convergence in the IT and AV sectors.

Now Chimoindes, who owns a stake in the new firm, has opened up to CRN on why he chose to leave Tech Data to start the new venture.

"Value-added distribution is a very overused term and what I saw with Beta - and the ambition from the CEO and the team - is to really be able to build a business that thrives on helping channels develop," he said.

"What we're doing at Beta DMS is quite unusual in distribution. The business is not set up like a normal distributor in the sense that we're not vendor siloed. We are built in such a way that our partner customers can have conversations with the right people about multi-vendor solutions."

Chimoindes claims that this unique set-up puts Beta DMS a step ahead of more traditional AV distributors and could help them move into the space left by Steljes.

"As everybody says, it's very sad when a well-established competitor such as Steljes leaves," he said.

"I think that Steljes was a very traditional AV distributor, did very well out of that and had loyal customers.

"Traditional services in distribution have always been around design and support and they're very valuable, but what we're doing here is going beyond that and proving services such as content creation, which gives partners the ability to go back to their customers and repeat sell."