Ingram and D&H make bold moves for 2010

If you were a big fan of DBL Distributing don’t be too disappointed that Ingram Micro has rebranded it dropping the DBL name. Yesterday, Ingram announced that DBL will be Ingram’s new consumer electronics division going forward.

Besides the name change everything will relatively stay the same including the line card and expert staff. More importantly this division will operate as a separate entity from Ingram’s broadline business.

I like this move simply because there is still a lot of friction between the IT resellers and the AV dealers as the convergence of IT with audio-video in the market grows. I still think that in the end the IT resellers will own a majority of this market place because the AV dealers are slow to adopt the complete end-to-end solutions a lot of customers are looking for these-days.

Ingram is going to build on DBL’s 20,000 plus product line and the goal is to be the top distributor of CE products in the world.

This CE division is only happening in the U.S. currently. The plan for Canada is tentatively slated for some time during the first half of 2010.

By making DBL part of Ingram, IT resellers who are interested in CE can now have a single source of distribution at multiple stocking locations. Ingram will also offer credit/financing with this new division something DBL did not offer.

Meanwhile, D&H Canada has added HP’s commerical computers to its line card. These new machines will be classified under the HP SmartBuy series of desktops, workstations, notebooks, displays and handheld devices.

The SmartBuy series is primarily targeted at the SMB, which is D&H’s sweet spot, but the distributor already has Acer and I’m not sure what HP gives them. Any reseller can get HP products from the other distributors. A different approach could have been signing up LG or Samsung that are looked upon as an alternative to Dell, Lenovo and HP.

On the display side, D&H has Acer, Viewsonic, BenQ, plus a few other lesser known brands. A brand like HP can definitely bolster D&H’s line card in this area, but even that to maybe diminished as more customers are replacing display units with big-screen notebooks in the workplace.

Partnering with HP is almost never a mistake because they are a fine organization with great products and equally great staff, but D&H entered the Canadian market place wanting to be different and I don’t see how this makes them different.

Greg Tobin, Canadian GM for D&H, told me that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” in terms of differentiating the distributor in the market place.

Bring HP SmartBuy onboard was simply responding to customer/reseller demand in the SMB for these products.

And, Tobin does have a point here. HP product are extremely popular in the channel and if Tobin does not listen to what his customer want; he wont have many of them.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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