Channel chalks up bumper December

Many businesses in the Australian channel got the best Christmas gift they could as for: a strong end to the year.

CRN is currently running an online poll asking our readers to tell us which quarter of 2014 was strongest. At time of writing, around 50 percent of readers had voted for the October-December period. Vote now

The data chimes with anecdotal evidence from some of the channel's top players. Leading east coast IT service providers Thomas Duryea, The Missing Link Network Integration and Applaud have all told CRN that December was a huge month.

Andrew Thomas, managing director of Thomas Duryea, said: "TD closed a record $12 million in sales for the December month alone. This was driven out of our strategic push toward cloud, mobility, and managed services. Interestingly, it was both a record month for cloud and for product."

In the financial year to June 2014, Thomas Duryea nudged $70 million of revenue – making its $12 million in a single month even more impressive.

It was a similarly strong end of year for Sydney managed service provider Applaud, said managing director Ricci Danieletto. "Our end of year was actually huge. I’m generally fretting come December as things traditionally go into a real slowdown due to Christmas parties and clients taking leave, but this December was actually the biggest single month we’ve had in years."

December 14 was Applaud's biggest single month since 2008. The surge was across products and services, with Danieletto singling out Nimble Storage as a standout vendor.

"December saw an increased demand for reliable, high-speed internet access, managed services, cloud computing, and security solutions. New and existing clients adopted more of our products and services to meet their growing information technology needs," he said.

The month's result was helped by "substantial software and hardware maintenance renewals for several of our enterprise clients", added Gambotto.

"With security becoming an increasing concern for businesses we also saw an influx in internet security."

Missing Link's performance was driven by strong performance from IBM, Lenovo, Webroot and Juniper.

Publicly listed IT giant UXC also saw a bumper end of year. In a statement to the ASX, the company revised up its forecast for the first half of the 2015 financial year.

UXC had been expecting a year-on-year revenue increase of 8 percent to $291.7 million and a rise of 50 percent in pre-tax profit to $4.6 million for the six months to 31 December.

It has now advised that revenue will be up 10.4 percent and pre-tax will increase by around 85 percent.

Fellow ASX-listed chanel company, mobile distributor Cellnet, has also revised up its forecast "as a result of improved trading performance over the November and December period".

Cellnet now expects its half-year pre-tax profit to be in the range of $1.7-$1.9 million, up from $375,000 in the prior corresponding half year.

Is this what you saw? Vote now in our online poll!