Fujitsu-Siemens is to recruit top-tier reseller partners in the coming months in a bid to ramp up its commercial desktop sales in Ireland.
Commercial sales director Paul McCord confirmed that the vendor was preparing to roll out “a proper and coherent channel programme,” saying the vendor had not previously had a structured commercial channel programme.
Fujitsu-Siemens has a three tier reseller programme aimed at the commercial sector, but the vendor will concentrate its efforts on recruiting partners to its premier accreditation in the short-term.
McCord said the firm had no premier resellers. “We have tier-one partners notionally that are split by revenue, but it would be unfair to expect them to keep trading with the volumes we want to grow to with fewer structure in place when other vendors have programmes in place.”
Fujitsu-Siemens aims to have up to 10 premier partners in Ireland by April. McCord said he had not decided how big the premier tier should be: “If the bar is sufficiently high, we will only get people who are interested in dealing with us for the long-term.”
The vendor was still “quite weak” in the commercial market and could potentially get a lot of gains, said McCord. “There is an amount of business and customers we’re not touching because we’re not engaging with the correct resellers in the proper way. We are winning business and sometimes we don’t even know why we’re winning it.”
By contrast, Fujitsu-Siemens has done well in the consumer market in Ireland through its partners, Dunne’s and Harvey Norman, although McCord admitted there had been “a little bit of a drop off before Christmas; our supply was not the best”.
McCord helped set up Compaq’s operation in Ireland in 1994 and rose to become head of HP’s personal systems group before moving to Sun and then joining Fujitsu-Siemens in 2006. He replaces Liam Halpin who has become sales director for the vendor’s consumer business in the UK.
Fujitsu-Siemens has also appointed Ciaran Friel as product manager for consumer products and Louise Brady as channel marketing assistant.
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