15 April 2008
by Paul Kunert
Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) and Bell Micro have ended their distribution contract on servers and storage.
Distributors Northamber, Micro P and Ingram Micro will continue to promote the vendor’s mainstream storage and Primergy server range but no channel replacement will be sought for Bell.
The agreement with Bell had not progressed as expected, said Ian Newall, director of SME and channel sales at FSC, but he insisted the split with the distributor had been amicable.
"Bell Micro could not grow in line with our investment and the development of our Primergy range," he told MicroScope.
Bell stopped selling FSC’s PCs in 2006 because the product did not fit into its enterprise sales strategic focus. The firm also stopped stocking Hewlett-Packard desktops and notebooks in the same year.
The creep of commoditisation in the x86 market has been evident in recent years and Jan Lawford, European commercial director at Bell, said the distributor was focusing its efforts squarely at the high end of the market.
"From a systems perspective, [volume servers] have not been a key focus for us. If you look at our strengths with Hewlett-Packard and IBM, they are around selling enterprise solutions," she said.
Bell still has some remaining FSC stock as the deal winds down and Lawford said the distributor intended to sub-distribute FSC servers and storage to "several key customers" that demanded its configuration service.
According to IDC data, FSC sold nearly 11,000 servers in the UK last year, representing 22 per cent unit growth, but server revenues fell 42 per cent.
Nathaniel Martinez, programme director for European server research at IDC, said all FSC’s marketing and investment had been designed to grow its footprint in the data centre through the x86 form factor.
"The challenge that FSC faces is one of brand recognition and it needs to build a significant channel to reach deep into the market," he said.
Both FSC and Bell said they were "investigating" the potential to strike a deal so that the distributor’s Leeds office, previously Open PSL, could promote FSC’s dynamic data centre solutions.
