United Electrical Group has tapped Ingram Micro on the shoulder to offer its extended warranty services to resellers. It follows the warranty provider's decision to part company with Westan.

The Ingram deal allowed United Electrical to concentrate on selling warranties direct in other product areas, including white and brown goods, director of customer relations, Teyghan Stadelbauer, said.

"We have always wanted to partner with somebody in the IT space, but have been very selective," she said. "We needed to form a strong partnership and had a few distributors in mind, but Ingram was top of our list."

Ingram will offer the United Electrical warranties as an extension to each manufacturer's warranty. Stadelbauer said the customer dealt with the vendor for the length of its warranty, then the United warranty kicked in.

Ingram product manager, Margaret Janaway, said the deal was a first for the distributor and would enable resellers to offer extended warranties regardless of what brands they sold.

"We've never offered anything as broad as this," she said. "The beauty of it is that it's across all brands, not vendor-centric."

Resellers will be able to offer a two-year upgrade warranty on PDAs and mobile phones for $49.95, through to $199 for a two-year upgrade warranty on a desktop or notebook PC.

Historically, United Electrical has worked with Victorian distributor, Westan, via a sub-distribution agreement.

"Westan was a little different as it was offering our warranties as a single SKU item in its OEM builds," Stadelbauer said. "Ingram distributes vendor brands and we're talking about upgrade warranties."

Westan managing director, Victor Aghtan, confirmed the relationship with United Electrical was over, but declined to go into detail. The distributor is now primarily working with CoverIT, with Computergate covering select products.