Supercom is making some strategic bets on Asus and little known Synology for its reseller base.
Based in Markham, Ont., Supercom is one of the top distributors of Asus products. According to Edman Lau, senior product manager at Supercom, of the 5,000-plus notebooks the distributor ships out
per month about 1,000 are either Asus-branded or Asus white book products.
The company’s current offering is an Asus notebook with a 64 bit AMD Athlon mobile processor, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics chip, and a Western Digital 2.5 inch hard drive. All three components are exclusives in the Canadian market, said Lau.
“”The 64 bit Athlon is not a desktop 64-bit cpu. Plus we are doing white book build-to-order for our reseller base in Canada using this chip,”” Lau said.
The Asus notebook can either be shipped branded as an Asus A2K series product with the choice of AMD Althon or Sempron chips or as a white book with a “”Powered by Asus”” logo
Lau is also including a Christmas discount promotion on this product. Reseller can receive 10 per cent discounts on this exclusive notebook offering. “”Christmas comes early at Supercom,”” Lau said.
The promotion, which ends Dec. 31st, also includes a free Asus notebook case, Lexmark printer, McAfee AntiVirus with a year of updates, the game Far Cry, two year warranty and no charge assembly. For an additional $20 Supercom will throw in a mini-USB speaker set.
Supercom is also upgrading its storage offering. Lau said that the attached storage market will be worth more than $10 billion by 2008 and the distributor wants to be ready for it.
Supercom has partnered with little known Synology of Taiwan, which makes the DS-101 Disk Station, a network attached storage barebone system. The DS-101 is a Linux-based three-in-one server. It can do file, back up and printer tasks, Lau said.
Priced at $245, it has a four-click install wizard and is able to handle mixed PC and Mac environments.
“”The hot spot for storage is around 40 GBs, but that is not enough with all the MP3s and movie downloads that are happening today. You will need more hard drive space,”” Lau said.
Lau added that he has sourced these smaller companies out for the Canadian reseller base because they are smaller, newer companies who are aggressive.
“”Our strength is to source our technology that is affordable for our reseller base,”” he said.
Besides the DS-101 Supercom will be offering the Asus WL-HDD Wireless Media Storage + Access Point product and the ReadyNAS 600, which Lau claims is the smallest RAID 5 NAS system in the world.
