Omega staff picked up by Altech

Altech Computers has snatched up nine former Omega employees following the company’s demise.

Former staff across Australia have been cherrypicked to fill sales and warehouse roles in Altech’s Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth offices.

According to Altech national sales manager Kevin Hartin, the timing of the hirings provided a nice Christmas bonus.

“It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to help them out given the timing,” he said. “We also struggle constantly to get experienced sales staff as a lot of people have resellers rather than distributor experience so we often have to train people up from scratch.”

Omega went into administration on 19 December.

The skills and experience boost also coincided with the distributor's expansion plans for 2006, Hartin said.

“This year we really want to focus on retail,” he said. “We have been able to bring our plans for expansion forward by three [months].”

With Omega out of the game, Altech was also moving to aggressively grow its books by targeting the failed distributor’s customer base, Hartin said.

“Our Brisbane office has already identified $500,000 a month of Omega resellers so we have moved to capture that,” he said. “In Sydney the sales opportunity is more like $750,000 a month.”