Gentek changes distribution strategy

Gentek Marketing has tweaked its strategy and is quietly becoming a specialty distributor.In May, then-company general manager John Herrington told CDN the Mississauga, Ont. company was shifting almost entirely out of distribution and would push its products through broadline distributors.
But it recently signed up several manufacturers whose products it will distribute to resellers until the lines sell well enough to be moved to other distributors.
“We began to get a lot of interest from vendors looking to us to represent their products,” said Jeffrey Freedman, Gentek’s vice-president of sales. Some don’t have enough sales volumes yet to pass on to bigger distributors, so it is doing the job.
However, all of its G-net line of products are going through other distributors.
Herrington left the company in June. “We had differences of opinion in what we wanted to do,” said Freedman.
Manufacturers recently signed include Aastra Telecom of Concord, Ont., which makes voice over IP phones and equipment, and Sangoma Technology of Toronto, which makes network connectivity devices.
“We approached Astra about the opportunity to distribute their line of voice over IP products, which is where we’re primarily concentrating our efforts,” Freedman said.
Aastra’s Enterprise IP line ranges from the 480i phone with an eight-line LCD screen and an optional cordless handset down to the 9112i, described as a value-priced single line phone.
Part of the line is also the CNX Conference Bridge, which allows conferencing on both PSTN and VoIP networks.
Gentek is also carrying Aastra’s lower-cost VentureIP peer-to-peer phone system which runs over a local area network through a switch. The phone is almost identical to the Enterprise 480i.“It’s an easy to install, plug-and-play product line,” said Freedman.
From Sangoma, Gentek is distributing the company’s network infrastructure hardware and software, which includes TDM voice and data cards, WANPipe modem/routers and API toolkits.
Freedman said Gentek is also including a trial version of Panda Software’s anti-virus application in all G-net products.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Howard Solomon
Howard Solomon
Currently a freelance writer, I'm the former editor of ITWorldCanada.com and Computing Canada. An IT journalist since 1997, I've written for several of ITWC's sister publications including ITBusiness.ca and Computer Dealer News. Before that I was a staff reporter at the Calgary Herald and the Brampton (Ont.) Daily Times. I can be reached at hsolomon [@] soloreporter.com

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