Top stories for 2006

PCA Survey: Telstra Australia’s worst tech company

Haymarket Media’s PC Authority magazine finally announced the results of its wide-ranging Reliability and Service survey. The comprehensive survey ran for three months, covered 142 product lines and saw 8500 opinions given to tech products and services available in Australia. Generally you might expect some 3000 or 4000 people to respond to similar surveys but PC Authority found its response more than doubled that. It was not simple either as every product and service was rated by asking multiple questions regarding their reliability, post-sales support and customer satisfaction for a product to even qualify for an award.

Cable boost for Internode

When national broadband company Internode announced plans to boost its network capacity to the US by 40 percent using a redundant route via Asia provided by Australia-Japan Cable (AJC), our readers paid attention. Simon Hackett, managing director at Internode, said the ISP signed a five-year agreement for AJC to supply an initial 1.2 Gb/s capacity, with a simple upgrade path to 4.8 Gb/s capacity – dual STM-16. The new link went live in January 2007 and adds to Internode’s existing 3 Gb/s of dedicated capacity to the US via the Southern Cross Cable fibre-optic link.

Death knell for notebook margins

When profits in the notebook market continued their downward spiral, many resellers reported unsustainable margins on laptop hardware sales. In early April 2006, Jeff Li, managing director at local builder Pioneer Computers, told CRN at the time that resellers were making a maximum of $15 margin on some brand name products. Many resellers around the country confirmed that this was the case. Resellers also claimed the sub-$1000 notebook was unhealthy for business. Notebooks sold at recommended retail prices of $900 and below would actually cost a retailer $1000 to purchase from a vendor. If the products did not sell then the reseller’s cash flow would be tied up.

TrueRent for resellers

Resellers are always interested in how to make their business different. They paid attention when rental and finance service provider Technology Fund Management launched TrueRent, an IT hardware rental offering that can be sold through resellers. TrueRent lets independent retail operators, resellers and systems integrators sell finance for IT equipment. Jol Sinclair, media spokesperson, said TureRent was developed to provide independent retailers with an alternative to Flexirent and RentSmart. TrueRent also provided resellers with access to marketing funds and products with pre-approved credit limits.

Microsoft launches Vista, Exchange Server 2007, Office 2007

To no-one’s surprise, Microsoft made ‘productivity’, ‘innovation’ and ‘collaboration’ the watch words of the business market launch of Vista, Exchange Server 2007 and Office 2007. When the products were launched in Sydney, as part of the global launch of the application triumvirate, Microsoft A/NZ managing director at the time Steve Vamos said that while people were now comfortable with collaboration via the Web, the true degree of interconnectivity was only now being touched upon.

Dynamic Supplies buys Toner Warehouse

Printer consumables distributor Dynamic Supplies gobbled up competitor Toner Warehouse for an undisclosed amount. Company owner and director Alex Piccinini used his own funds to purchase Toner Warehouse
from its owner Isabel Fryer. Piccinini said his acquisition gave the Brisbane, Queensland-headquartered distributor a warehouse in Sydney and access to more vendors such as Epson and Brother, although agreements with these vendors were subsequently “under review”.

Cellnet heads into SA with HiTech acquisition

Rumours of Cellnet’s impending acquisition of a distributor were finally confirmed when it bought SA distributor HiTech Distribution. In an ASX statement Cellnet managing director Adam Davenport said the acquisition provided a strategic expansion of both Cellnet’s national footprint and IT market presence. “South Australia is a similar market to Queensland as it features a large regional area with a lot of small to medium sized clients. The acquisition allows us to significantly grow our volumes there,” he said.

Casual resellers: Symantec wants you

Security products from the likes of Symantec still proved to be popular amongst CRN readers. They continued to give feedback about Symantec’s call to sign up casual resellers to its certified partner program in the new year, after the dust settled from its Veritas acquisition. Julie Parrish, vice-president of global channels at Symantec, flew in to Sydney to convince about 6000 regular business partners in Australia, ranging from integrators to small white-box builders, of the advantages to being an official Symantec partner.

Synnex wants telcos to sell Mio

Distributor Synnex wanted Telstra and Optus to push its latest Mio PDA/phone through their retail channels. The distributor’s push to sell its latest product, the Mio A701, through Telstra and Optus stores signalled its first foray into the telecommunications retail channel. Mio’s A701 is a combined mobile phone, GPS unit and PDA device. The PDA/phone comes with Windows Mobile 5.0 and also has Bluetooth 1.2.

Dell’s first AMD notebook hits our shores

Dell Australia released its Inspiron 1501 laptops, the first models
based on AMD chips. The Inspiron 1501 line-up starts at $1099 and comes built with a 1.8GHz Sempron, 512MB of memory, a 60GB hard drive and a 15.4-inch LCD screen. It is double the cost of the US product. Dell planned to offer buyers a choice between the Sempron, Turion 64 and dual-core Turion 64 X2 processors.

Wireless rabbit creates Internet buzz

CRN readers could not get enough of the story about a social networking product that was hunting for local resellers. A wireless rabbit computer peripheral had been causing a stir of excitement on social networking sites. Talking, singing and waggling its ears, this rabbit interfaces with Internet content as a high-tech toy of the new millennium. Taking the shape of an unobtrusive white blob, this “rabbit” features cartoonish eyes and animatronic rabbit ears that swivel and rotate in response to various stimuli, such as wireless streaming music or realtime stock reports.

Pioneer upgrades Vista

Readers jumped on the story about Pioneer Computers offering Vista upgrades, before any dates were even set for its release. Speaking to CRN, Jeff Li managing director at Pioneer, said from 26 October 2006 to March 2007, all Pioneer DreamVision PCs, DreamBook notebooks and server products installed with Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition or Windows XP Professional would be eligible for a free upgrade to Vista. He said the white-box maker had been given the go ahead to start advertising the upgrades from Microsoft’s US head office.

AMD chip shortage hits local builders

System builders were up in arms over a severe shortage of Advanced Micro Devices’ Athlon 64 X2 processors, largely blamed on the chipmaker’s global OEM agreement with Dell. Builders claimed they had been having trouble for months getting their hands on AMD chips because the chipmaker actually had a similar production problem that had plagued Intel. Dell was blamed for buying 50 percent of AMD chips globally and creating the shortage.