Synnex Canada has signed a deal with Maxtor Corp. allowing it to market and sell most of the Milpitas, Calif.-based storage vendor’s line of desktop and enterprise drives and external
storage products.
Synnex Canada will distribute Maxtor’s DiamondMax desktop drives, MaXLine and Atlas enterprise drives and OneTouch external storage devices to resellers and original equipment manufacturers throughout Canada.
Synnex Canada’s American parent, based in Fremont, Calif., will also distribute the products in the U.S. The two companies are currently working on a go-to-market strategy, which will be announced next month.
Alex Nobile, Synnex Canada’s vice-president of product management, said the distribution agreement will help it grow its storage revenues and give its customers another source for Maxtor products. Synnex Canada expects to have Maxtor inventory in its Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto warehouses in the next couple of weeks.
“”I think its a great opportunity for Synnex and it presents a challenge that we look forward to because it gets us into a part of the market that we were not in before,”” said Nobile.”” (Maxtor) is a very important and very large part of the storage market in Canada. It makes sense to align the top distributor in the system integrator market with a top storage vendor.””
Maxtor, which did not disclose details of the deal, said it is consistent with the company’s strategy to deepen and broaden its reach to resellers in Canada and worldwide. The deal makes Synnex the sixth Maxtor distributor here.
Synnex also carries Fujitsu and Western Digital storage products.
Bob Barbeau, Maxtor’s senior director of Pan-American distribution sales, said the vendor is very excited and pleased to have a new partner.
“”We spent time talking to resellers and Synnex often popped up as a leading distributor in Canada,”” said Barbeau. Because almost all of Maxtor’s drives are sold through the channel in Canada, Barbeau said signing Synnex made sense.
“”Synnex Canada can offer (Maxtor) a new set of customers,”” he said, citing other key benefits including ease of business as Synnex has multiple warehouse locations in here, with its Toronto location providing same-day service.
Nobile agreed. “”We bring a lot of customers to Maxtor who are not buying Maxtor who are buying other drives. Similarly, Maxtor brings us customers who may not have been buying from Synnex who were buying Maxtor products
He said Synnex has a very strong product line to offer customers but admitted that there are some openings, with Maxtor being one of them.
“”We could offer 95 per cent of the name brands that our customers wanted but we have a couple of holes and Maxtor was probably the largest hole.””
Jaba System Inc. of Markham, Ont., which has partnered with Synnex Canada since it was known as Merisel Inc., was one of the resellers that dropped Synnex’s name in meetings with Maxtor.
Daniel Yung, general manager of Jaba System — which specializes in purpose-built servers, computer telephony integration and industrial/commercial rackmount solutions — said it now has a one-stop shop when purchasing components.
“”We can now keep our inventory level lower and our support level will be easier with one-stop shopping,”” said Yung, adding it allows the company to pinpoint a specific brand with Synnex, which means less time spent shopping around.
In general, Yung said, the deal benefits resellers and the vendor.
“”It’s good for us as a reseller as we now have another choice,”” he said. “”It also gives Maxtor better market penetration. Synnex (in the past) never had a secondary product, now we can fall back to a secondary vendor if the primary vendor’s product is not available.””
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