Ingram's Reseller of the Year 2008 Matrix CNI on surviving the economic downturn

The company, which works with vendors HP Procurve, Aruba Networks, F5, Juniper Networks and Cisco has a number of distributors including Ingram Micro, Distribution Central, Avnet and Westcon Group.

It received Ingram Micro's Enterprise Solutions Award for Reseller of the Year 2008 through its achievements with HP ProCurve and Juniper.

'Like everybody else the recession is a new challenge for Matrix CNI.

Since our company's inception, this is the first time that we have had to deal with the economic climate as it is today. Having said that, we are having a great year.

Last year was a record year for us and we are currently ahead of last year's results with the immediate forecast looking good.

We also picked up some great industry awards from key partners such as HP ProCurve, Aruba Networks and Ingram Micro.

This is not to say that the recession will not affect us and as such we continue to plan around ways to sustain the growth of our business.

Apart from making sure that our financials are strong, and ours are, the most important thing for us is ensuring that we are in a position to be a trusted advisor to our clients.

During these tough economic times end-users may find that they have less resources to maintain and develop their IT requirements so they need the ability to call on resellers like us to be a knowledgeable resource to them.

Reseller land is continually a balance of how much time we spend with customers versus the vendors.

It is important that we are skilled in vendor's solutions so we spend a lot of time and effort in training and vendor certification.

With our capabilities customers benefit from our skills and experience in delivering the required solution.

In one way the beneficiaries of the current economic climate may be the end users as we are busy strategising on how to provide even better value for money to our clients with our solution offering. 

The focus for this year

The next year will be about giving customers more value for money. I think that clients will demand solutions that assist them in reducing their operating costs whilst improving their competitive edge.

If clients take the time to look closer they will see that with some of the technologies around they can get a quicker return on their investment and save money on capital and operational expenditure.

An example of this is the ability for customers to accelerate the performance of their existing WAN links without increasing bandwidth and thus saving money.

An even more direct example is how to get rid of the cost of maintenance contracts for switching infrastructure such as HP ProCurve.  

Apart from that, we believe there could also be broad operational and infrastructure efficiencies gained through incremental customer investment in mobility technologies such as wireless, unified messaging and secure remote access.    

On winning the HP Procurve Asia-Pacific and Japan Platinum Partner of the Year 2008

We have been the largest HP Procurve reseller in Australia for five years now so we would have been happy to be recognised for that but the regional award demonstrates that we are doing a great job in an even broader context and that the Australian market knows good value when they see it.

I'm guessing that HP Procurve in Australia would be happy with this result as it would help their future endeavours in growing the profile of their business from a personnel and investment perspective in Australia.

Personally the highlight up to this point for Matrix CNI was when we were named in the Top 10 in the 2007 BRW Fast Starters but this achievement surpasses that.

I think that business is on the up for HP Procurve as their stable of offerings is growing to cover more solutions in the core, distribution and edge space.

Add to that their Lifetime Warranty with NBD hardware replacement for their entire switching portfolio and clients would be well advised to take a closer look at Procurve and see how they can save money on recurrent maintenance contracts.'