Stories by: Tamara Plakalo

Aggressive pricing and competition is going to make it a tough year for projector vendors and their channel partners, but rising demand in the consumer market and the promise of smaller and portable models means there's still plenty of opportunity out there.

The dollar up/dollar down game is a bit confusing for me. Over the last few years, every time our national currency appreciated or depreciated in value, the channel barely batted a lid. Yet on the analytically-inclined side of town, doomsayers and channel Anthony Robins-ites alike scream attention, tolling their respective bells like there is no tomorrow.

The founder of MOUS Business Systems, Peter Hickey, has unleashed a new venture on the IT channel that aims to combine growth-driven business competitiveness with charitable work in a competition ambitiously named the Business Olympics.

Like technology itself, the supply chain for its goods and services has undergone a massive evolution. While the route to market has become essential to a product’s success, there is still no definitive answer to what constitutes the best channel. On the one hand, the industry is facing the reality of high commoditisation and a changing set of customer needs, on the other, there is shareholder pressure to keep operational costs at a bare minimum. In this chain, the channel is the vital link expected to deliver value to both ends. ARN’s inaugural Round Table asked six industry figures to discuss whether the traditional value-added distribution channel was set up for the higher economic efficiency/higher value paradigm. And the answer is ... yes!

Value is intangible and revenue is king, but for the value-added distributors and their partners, the future is always a blank page to be written on. Thus spoke the ARN Round Table participants when asked to define the notion of value and its delivery in an environment where adversity of change and its psychological impact are rapidly rewriting the definitions of key supply chain concepts and relationships.

Value-added distribution is alive, well and growing. That was the consensus of the inaugural ARN Round Table attended by several prominent industry figures in Sydney last week. We will bring you more on the content of the discussion in next week’s issue, when we reveal what top executives from distributors Avnet and Ingram Micro, vendors IBM and Enterasys, and resellers Computer Merchants and MBS, said to each other when they sat down for an industry heart-to-heart.

Every now and then you write a column that you know is going to come back and bite you on the bum. Well, this one is it. I can’t help it. And, frankly, I don’t want to, for since what I’m about to say is dying to come out of my mouth, it may as well be ON the record. So here it is: Thank God for the PR people!

Toshiba’s mobile marketing team has conducted a formal review of its channel strategy realigning marketing support for 29 of its tier one customers with tier two dealers in an effort to encourage ‘product sale’.

It’s easy to be an enfant terrible when the federal government is your daddy, local population sees you as an instrument of wealth creation and those in charge of regulating your business also happen to be those who would benefit least from deregulating your stranglehold on the jugular of the industry you belong to.

Local components and peripherals space is to be reshaped following the signing of a deal that will see distributors, BBF and Bluechip Infotech (formerly Servex), merge the operations.

Dicker Data and eXeed have broken off merger talks after failing to agree on terms of the agreement.