Softchoice takes aim at $2 billion

After completing three major acquisitions, Softchoice, a Toronto-based large account reseller, is focusing its efforts this year on its integration strategies and streamlining its solutions to work towards its corporate goal of becoming a two-billion dollar and beyond company.

David MacDonald, CEO of Softchoice, said 2007 marked an important year for the company, in which its annual earnings grew 38 per cent year over year. The company’s acquisitions from the past five months include NexInnovations’ Technology Solutions and Professional Services division in October, Software Plus in December, and most recently, Optimus Solutions in January. MacDonald said the acquisitions have helped the company benefit from a growth perspective as well as helping it to provide additional value-based solutions to its customers.

“We were able to retain the bulk of the people and customers from NexInnovations,” MacDonald said. “Software Plus expanded our software footprint in the U.S. and also increased our presence in the enterprise account space. With our acquisition of Optimus Solutions, we can now deliver robust data centre solutions around storage, virtualization and UC (unified communications) solutions and technologies in both the U.S. and Canada,” he added.

Goals for the company this year, MacDonald said, include working to integrate the three companies into Softchoice’s cultural community, which he says, will help to solidify and reinforce its position as a large solution provider in the market.

To help the company achieve its goal of becoming a two-billion dollar company, MacDonald said Softchoice will also continue to engage in its present work with Microsoft.

“Microsoft has a strong product pipeline,” MacDonald said. “We think this will have a lot of impact on the marketplace and it will solidify our position of Vista.”

The company, he continued, will also focus heavily around green computing and eco-friendly practices pertaining to areas such as storage and services. Softchoice will be unveiling a new database, using the environmental rating system, Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), within its systems to help customers find and deploy green products such as desktop PCs and monitors later next month.

“We’ll be populating EPEAT information on our Web site which will be made available to our customers,” MacDonald said. “Customers can then select products based on EPEAT standards and can also look at price and manufacturers to help them make decisions. We’ll be launching this on Earth Day, which is on April 22,” he added.

Another important area in which Softchoice will be focusing its efforts on this year is around the services market. Softchoice has a consultative IT asset management service called TechCheck, which MacDonald says has been a tremendous success for the company over the past three years.

“It’s a unique offering where we’re taking the customer’s information and are using it to interpret and then provide feedback to help them make decisions and to help manage their software assets,” MacDonald said. “We’ll also move towards storage and virtualization to help customers manage their services more effectively and we’ll also focus on our Microsoft business where we’ll focus on the Exchange environments and we’ll offer integration with things like Server and Vista,” he adds.

Currently MacDonald notes that about 60 per cent of Softchoice’s overall business comes from the U.S. He said he expects this percentage to increase as time goes on since the U.S. is much bigger in size and scope than the Canadian market and base is.

“We now have 45 branches across North America with five call centres,” MacDonald said. “We feel that we have a strong footprint in the U.S. and Canada and we’ve laid the foundations for our next stage of growth. Our next focus will be on trying to figure out how we can grow further in Asia and Europe.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
Staff Writer, Computer Dealer News

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