Ingram Micro Canada’s Nimax point-of-sale division has added a prominent bar code manufacturer to its offerings.
VARs are now able to order products from Metrologic Instruments, which include handheld, hands-free, in-counter and portable retail and industrial scanners.
“This is a feather in our cap,” said John Soumbasakis, vice-president and general manager of the Nimax division for North America.
Among Metrologic’s most recent product releases are the Optimus R, S, and SBT (Bluetooth) batch portable data collectors, the MS3780 Fusion single-line scanner and the Stratos S high throughput, slim-line, bioptic scanner/scale.
In May the publicly-traded company announced that in its last quarter it had revenues of US$60.2 million and net income of US$4.4 million. The same month it bought the assets of Visible-RF, LLC, a privately held Massachusetts start-up whose technology combines RFID communications with bi-stable display materials. Metrologic also announced a strategic partnership with MaxID, which has resulted in two recently introduced RFID readers for North America.
However, its leadership is in flux. Benny Noens, who had been president and CEO since 2004, announced in April he would be resigning for personal reasons effective next month. He is being replaced on an interim basis by Metrologic founder and chairman C. Harry Knowles until a new CEO is found.
Metrologic was asked for a spokeman to expand on the Nimax Canada deal. However, no one responded by press time.
Nimax was bought by Ingram early least year, and while the unit has been operating in Canada for the last five quarters, it has taken some time to bring all of the vendors in its linecard here. That’s because Nimax, which operated in the U.S. and Latin America, didn’t have a Canadian division, so contracts for vendors it carried didn’t include the right to distribute here.
It’s taken some time to negotiate new contracts, Soumbasakis said, and even after a year only about 50 of the vendors Nimax carried before the acquisition are available here. “We still don’t have the exact same linecard in Canada that we have in the U.S.,” Soumbasakis said, “but we’ve established relationships with most of the big vendors.”
VARs also have access to Ingram’s full line of storage, servers, network and and wireless products to add to the Nimax lines and build full solutions.
Soumbasakis estimated some 300 Canadian Ingram VARs buy through Nimax each quarter, a number that has been growing since the division was established.
He refused to say how many resellers buy through the division, nor detail its revenues here. “We’re pretty happy with the breadth of customers, which grows month to month,” he said.
“We’re finding more and more Ingram VARS are either active in this space or are looking to grow into this space because the margin profile is attractive.”