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

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