Dicker Data has increased its datacentre play through a partnership with switching vendor, Blade Network Technologies.
The distributor will take Blade’s Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet RackSwitch product family to the market for the vendor’s first local channel foray.
Blade CEO, Vikram Mehta, said Dicker Data was a good fit, with an existing datacentre business, a strong reseller network and understanding of the market.
“In the long time I’ve worked in the market, I have learned that you need to make sure you set-up a channel structure that provides good margins for distributors and resellers, and to do that you don’t want to overdistribute the market,” Mehta said. “We made sure we carefully picked the right distributor for us.”
Despite the economy, there are a number of strong opportunities for its products in the market, Mehta said, including financial services, retail, government and research verticals.
“There are a few other really interesting verticals where we see strong opportunity,” he said. “One of our first customers in the local market has been Team Bondi – a games development vendor with intensive graphic and data demands from its switches.”
Dicker Data sales manager, Chris Price, said the switches filled a gap in the distributor’s enterprise server and storage portfolio – a part of the business that has been recovering nicely from the start of the year.
“February was a real disaster for us, but we’ve seen a steady increase since then,” Price said. “There’s significant confidence back in the market, and projects that had been on the cards in October and November of last year, then put on hold, are being requoted for.”
Dicker Data had ramped up its resources in the field as well, he said. The presales tech team had doubled.
