The improvements to its “Channel Connection” portal is part of a wider push by the firm to increased its channel presence across the region following recent Pan European agreements with distributors Ingram Micro and ASBIS Enterprises Plc, alongside existing relationships with C2000, MicroP, Gem and Enta serving around 2000 UK resellers.
Portal
The partner portal, which is available in English, German, French and Italian, has been updated to include new product information including the portable MicroStation Solid State Disk (SSD) and new DD-WRT based wireless products.
Says Paul Hudson, Buffalo’s Sales director northern Europe: “The portal is an important extension to our marketing effort and includes complete launch kits to support the channel.”
The vendor is also pushing heavily into the SMB and enterprise space which now accounts for around 50 percent of its revenue according to Hudson, an achievement he assigns in part to a strategy to add enterprise class features such as built-in web and file servers across both its consumer and business devices.
Hudson comments that they “...have seen a more business orientated ‘pro-sumer’ emerging into the market” and points to the growth in sales of dual drive raided NAS (Network Attached Storage) at the entry level as a indication that modern consumers are starting to understand the benefits of fault tolerance and redundancy of data.
Growing market
Buffalo is gearing itself up for a stronger 2010 following research by market analysis firm In-Stat which estimates the consumer network storage market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40 percent between 2009 and 2014.
In-Stat, which tracks sales data across the Consumer NAS market, ranked Buffalo as the number one vendor for 2009 ahead of rivals including Western Digital, Iomega and Hewlett Packard. “The market has become very crowded,” comments Hudson referring to a number of new entrants such as Netgear and D-link who have aggressively entered the market with competitively-priced NAS devices, but he believes that key Buffalo differentiators such as shipping units fully populated with drives, ready to run out of the box and the strong Buffalo brand will allow the vendor to retain its top spot.
