Mark Bialic flies to Asia four times a year to scout the latest technologies for his company, Ottawa-based laptop manufacturer Eurocom Corp.
It has grown significantly since starting in 1989 building desktop replacements powered by a 16-Mhz 286 CPU.
Today, Eurocom has 300 resellers in Canada
alone for its five lines of high-end notebooks, sells in the U.S., Europe and South Africa and is eyeing the creation of a wall-mounted PC for homes and hotels.
Some VARs — “”by invitation only”” — are allowed to put their own names on white box versions of his products.
But last month, the day before he was to leave for another trip to Japan and Taiwan, he chatted with CDN about why only about 80 of those Canadian partners are performing well.
A good reseller should be able to sell one of his machines a day, he figures.
But “”a lot of resellers are very passive, they wait for customers to come,”” he said in an accent that betrays his European birth. “”Customers have a lot of alternatives, so resellers have to change they way they think.
Be proactive
“”They have to be proactive, keep in touch with their customer base and offer innovative solutions.
“”They don’t have interest in new technologies because there’s no demand coming from their clients. But the reseller should be a leader in the marketplace.
“”They should be the first ones going to clients and identifying to them new technologies before they even happen so they can build trust.””
This pro-business entre-preneur came to Canada from Poland via England in 1984 as a political refugee. Although Poland was a Communist country in those years, he studied management there and later in London.
Arriving here in a recession made finding a job tough enough that he spent two years getting an MBA at the University of Ottawa.
Then things brightened: On one day he got half a dozen job offers. The one he took was a computer co-ordinator for the city of Ottawa as it moved to desktop computers, all of which his department assembled.
The industry contacts he made in those years were valuable. The experience also made him believe he had the ability to see where information technology could go.
Forseeing a need for a mobile desktop, he left the municipality in 1989, hired a team and went into business for himself.
Five lines
From a single line of notebooks the company has expanded to five: To the desktop replacements have been added all-in-ones, thin models, convertables and mobile workstations. This last is Eurocom’s fastest-growing product.
Although an independent manufacturer, Bialic said the company offers service in 155 locations across the country.
Resellers can look forward in the middle of next year to getting their hands on a new line, which Bialic dubs the mobile server — a laptop with dual AMD Opteron processors and SCSI hard drives for software developers. In a pinch, it can also be used as a back-up server.
Why not Intel? “”At this moment the Opteron solution is superior to Intel technology,”” he explained. Opterons run cooler and use less energy.
On his Asian trip he was looking forward to learning about suppliers’ plans for the upcoming generation of 19-inch screens for laptops.
Wall TVs
As for even longer term, Bialic is pondering building wall-mounted PC-TV combos.
“”We see over time this will get into homes, hotels and airports,”” he said, where users can combine video entertainment with computer work. Hotels in particular should be interested in the product because they can be securely mounted, replacing boxy, space-eating TVs. Depending on the size they could be equipped with a touch screen, in his vision.
Already he’s feeling out hotel chains, but acknowledged that so far it’s just a concept — although if greeted enthusiastically enough he said it could be brought to market quickly.
“”The most important thing is to generate innovations that sell and allow us to grow,”” he said.
“”Today we are working on technologies for 2006, 2007.
I would like to have an organization I know that is capable of having this kind of mental infrastructure forever, because this is what matters in business.””
And with that, he was off to the airport.
