Can you give me a brief overview of Synaxon, and in particular it’s UK operation?
Synaxon has 2,800 reseller partners in Germany, representing 15 percent of the total IT market spend. In the UK it has 525 reseller partners, 22 distribution partners and 10 direct vendor partners.
We have also just completed our first publication (iTrends) with 188 reseller partners distributing more than 50000 copies to end-users.
Synaxon UK delivers a community of professional resellers to their distribution partners. Distributors benefit through a reduction in cost of sale and an increase in independent reseller support for their offerings. Vendors benefit through a low cost route to promoting their service or products directly to resellers’ end customers (SME and SOHO), thus creating a push back through the channel. Vendors also benefit through Synaxon assistance in growing their dealer programmes.
What partners does Synaxon UK work with?
Distribution partners include Ingram Micro, Enta Technologies, ETC and Midwich. Synaxon has negotiated favourable trading terms for Synaxon independent resellers from each of our partner distributors, including lower pricing and improved or even free delivery rates.
Supporting vendors include Epson, Brother, Kaspersky, Buffalo Technologies and Swann. Many supporting vendors have exclusive offers for Synaxon members, which are displayed as ‘top offers’ within our EGIS (Enterprise Global Information System) platform, and promoted via the iTrends publication.
In addition to directly supporting vendors, Synaxon has 15 to 20 further vendors that participate in product promotions within iTrends via their selected distributor, e.g. HP, Logitech, Tom Tom, Acer, Seagate, Bigredbox, Kensington and Canon.
Traditional dealer groups are sometimes viewed negatively – what do you think the reasons are for this, and how is Synaxon different?
Dealer groups or ‘buying groups’ agree to deliver a service to their respective communities of resellers and work with their selected distributors to influence the spending patterns of their reseller communities, thus delivering an upturn in sales for both resellers and distributors. Some dealer groups fall short and deliver very little to their resellers or distributors simply because they don’t have the necessary resources or tools to creating real value-add within the channel.
Synaxon is delivering a new concept to the IT channel, a concept that is being delivered through significant investment into the UK and a concept with a proven track record in Europe. We focus on delivering real value to our dealers, vendors and distributors.
What is the EGIS portal?
EGIS is our in-house fully integrated stock availability and procurement system. EGIS delivers pre-negotiated, preferential pricing and trading terms to resellers. Once implemented, the Synaxon member can place their orders with distributors directly via the system without the requirement to visit the various distributors’ websites.
EGIS content is now almost 300,000 SKUs and includes all major brands, and the system is populated with rich CNet content, including image and accurate data sheets for the majority of the listings.
In addition to stock and price via distributors EGIS also includes: marketing templates; community forums; data pack so EGIS content can be exported via a block of CSV files to the dealer’s back office system or uploaded to his existing e-commerce platform and WebStore.
What, in your opinion, are some of the biggest challenges facing channel companies?
Distributors obviously need to carefully manage their cost base without cutting back on dealer (customer) service. They also need to review how they are most likely to attract new dealer business in a depressed market. Vendors need to review how they spend their diminishing marketing pots, supporting organisations that can demonstrate a clear ROI and a route to market. One of the most difficult challenges for them is how to cost effectively create end user demand for their product or service: resellers will not purchase a vendor’s product from the distributor if he is not getting a demand from his end-user customers.
Resellers need to invest in their business and have a clear direction and strategy and strengthen their balance sheets to retain credit lines, as they can no longer expect substantial credit lines without any share capital expecting distribution to take the total risk.
