Toshiba signs ITW in SMB comms drive

Toshiba has appointed IT Wholesale (ITW) as a national distributor to accelerate an SMB push outside traditional IT and into communications.

Mark Whittard, general manager at Toshiba Australia's information systems division, said the appointment added another string to Toshiba's bow targeting incremental growth.

The deal takes effect 1 June.

"We have been talking to them [ITW] for over a year and we have been looking at the small business market in particular," he said. "ITW specialises in that space."

Further, ITW had "very strong reseller relationships" including strong links to the communications space offering telephony products and so on.

"And we are seeing more and more resellers traditionally having been communications resellers and coming over to do more and more mobile computing solutions," Whittard said.

Toshiba was eyeing communications resellers just as it had also begun targeting the audio-visual (AV) channel. Both would augment the vendor's traditional PC channel customers, Whittard said.

"The convergence we're seeing from the communications side ... we're seeing that on the AV side as well," he said.

ITW would join Toshiba's existing distributor line-up of Ingram Micro, Dicker Data and South Australia's BMS Technology, he said.

Toshiba expects to introduce a broadened portfolio of mobility products, including notebooks and projectors, next month.

IDC figures have suggested that Toshiba lost its top seller's spot in the last quarter. However, those figures bore no relation to Toshiba's decision to appoint another distributor, Whittard said.

"That's rubbish," he said. "That's not the reason. We've ben talking to [ITW] since February last year."

ITW had been looking to extend beyond its main vendor, IBM, while Toshiba had already been eyeing a more aggressive SMB focus that included communications and AV as well as PC players, he suggested.

Toshiba's previous quarter had been very strong. Anyway, quarterly figures tended to fluctuate and did not indicate a trend, he pointed out.

"It's business as usual," Whittard said. "You've got to look at it holistically. We put forward $9 million to $10 million between January and December. That went into our fourth quarter numbers, where we gained several points of market share."