eXeed triples vendor ranks

Melbourne-based distributor eXeed has tripled its vendor ranks, adding four partners to its previous two - giving it national coverage in the first of a number of new signings expected to grow revenues to $30 million in two years.

Michael Bosnar, managing director of eXeed, said the distributor had signed Fuji-Xerox Printers, Acer Computer Australia, Fujitsu Servers amd Emerson UPS. The company expects to sign five more vendors by mid-October. This number would include former vendor partner relationships of Digiland, which merged with eXeed last month.

'We did mostly the eastern seaboard before, but now we have client business coming from South Australia and Western Australia,' he said.

The Digiland brand would be dropped, he added.

Bosnar said the four vendors were chosen for their ability to offer best-of-breed product in mobility, servers and printing.

eXeed has been building a 3G channel using Hutchison Telecom 3G and South Australia and Western Australia had been particularly quick to adopt that technology, he added.

He said that one of eXeed's other vendors, HP, had strong presence in mobility, printing and servers but hinted that the distributor did not wish to become too dependent on that company.

'We started off doing HP and with all the changes in the marketplace and things that HP is doing and with regards to the IT space, and we've invested a lot in the telco space as well,' Bosnar said.

Fuji-Xerox had 25 percent of the colour printing and multi-function printing market, Acer had a strong strategy in notebooks, desktops and servers, and Emerson was looking to develop its channel, he said.

Bosnar said eXeed has already taken on 'at least half a dozen' more staff, and would add 'a couple' more next week. It plans to review numbers again after the next five vendors were added in October.

The company was not looking at cutting any of the 4,000 resellers from its ranks, but was re-focusing its business on SMBs as opposed to retail, Bosnar said.

'There are a lot of resellers that we have now in the database ... I think we're just going to continue with the SMB resellers and that will be our focus,' Bosnar said. 'We won't be focusing on retail or whitebox or OEMs.'