IT Wholesale signs NEC

The NEC agency would be worth between $4 million and $6 million to the distributor in the first year, said Daryl Tucker, general manager at IT Wholesale.

Under the arrangement, the distributor would move NEC notebooks, desktop PCs and tablet PCs across Australia.

Tucker said the company is only utilising between 60 and 65 percent of its Brisbane warehouse infrastructure and the NEC deal gives the distributor an alternative to IBM. “We needed to expand our range--we're currently really reliant on IBM. We wanted an alternative brand, not everyone likes IBM,” said Tucker. “NEC might get us into that retail type area that we haven't been in before,” he said.

However, IBM sales at the distributor are strong. The company turned over around $65 million in IBM product sales last financial year and expects that it would see 10 percent growth this financial year ending June 30, said Tucker. On average, the distributor moves a whopping 1200 IBM desktop products each month, 800 IBM notebooks and 600 IBM server products.

Tim Falinski, general manager at NEC Computers Australia, said it appointed IT Wholesale due to its ability to engage with NEC's target market of small to medium sized enterprises.

In the meantime, IT Wholesale is set to strike a storage distribution deal with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), as part of a plan to setup an enterprise division which will sell IBM and Hitachi storage and possibly Tivoli software products, Tucker said.