Beta Distribution is moving towards storage and away from consumables.
Channel Web reported on Beta Distribution’s plans to switch focus to storage and enterprise, which it hopes will allow it to raise £200 million ($311 million/€279 million) in revenue by 2016. The company intends to “focus on the storage space” and eventually have this “account of half of its business by 2016”, with an eye on a “move towards the enterprise world”.
The company began as a calculator repair firm 30 years ago, and expanded into fax machines before focusing in the last 10 years on printers, toner cartridges and inkjet cartridges. This business has accounted for 75 percent of its offerings up until now, but Nigel Morris, Beta Distribution’s Marketing Director, stated that “we are now going through our latest transformation, which is moving away from transactional products like consumables into products based around data, storage and services associated with that”.
He added that “the best illustration I can give, is that four or five years ago, storage products were around five or six percent of our business – this year they will be 40 percent of the business”. The company expects the storage side to “account for around half” of its total business by the end of 2016, and has “enjoyed some sharp growth” recently, seeing revenues grow from £67.4 million ($104 million/€94 million) in 2009 to £158 million ($245 million/€220 million) this year.
In the past few weeks, Beta Distribution has signed up “a number of new vendors” including Exablox and Falconstor, both of which are focused on the storage market. Ricky Patel, Beta’s Enterprise Business Manager, commented that it is “looking to take on another vendor in the next quarter”, and its long term plan is to “bring on two or three vendors at a time, develop a plan, execute it with the target-market resellers and then go and create additional reseller partners”.
The storage focus will take in both backup and archive recovery, having already “nailed” commodity-based storage, with Patel stating that Beta will introduce “entry-level enterprise storage” for companies ranging from 250 to 4,000 employees. The company “does not have a warehouse of its own”, and Morris added that this is “one of the reasons we have been able to grow so fast […] we are a distributor who outsources our distribution capabilities”.
He concluded: “The benefit of that from our point of view is that if we decide to bring on a new range of products, like we are doing now, we simply ask DPD, who are our warehouse, to move the tape and make the room a bit bigger. It means we have been able to grow so fast, because we can bring on all these products without worrying about bricks and mortar.”