Acer subsidiary Gateway, through French manager Kevin O’Donoghue, has unveiled more details about its strategy and positioning in Europe. Facing questions about its competition with its mother company, Gateway has cleared minds, by announcing that it would exclusively target SMB and midmarket, while Acer would directly work on very small companies and Soho as well as public administrations.
Gateway is already distributed (or soon will be) through broadliner Tech Data in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Ireland and the United Kingdom, and in Italy through Esprinet. It plans to expand to Switzerland (where it has ironically its European headquarters) before year’s end and will slowly open in Eastern Europe and Middle East/Africa through local partners between the end of the year and the beginning of 2010. It has chosen Tech Data (and Esprinet) because of their good coverage of local SMB resellers. In Eastern Europe, Tech Data is mainly absent (except in Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, being a leader only in Poland), and will thus not be able to cover broadly the region. This explains while local distributors will be privileged, to better address local resellers.
The company has officially unveiled its first products (3 notebooks and 2 PCs), all built around Intel processors and plans to launch its first servers before year’s end : “building server is not a problem of hardware, rather of adequate servicing and options. We prefer take our time and unveil them later, when our operations will be more ready than now”, explained O’Donoghue. Gateway has also presented its Managed Services : a SaaS offer allowing resellers to configure, manage or protect the assets of their clients. Gateway Managed Services will be available through its distributors, first in the United Kingdom, then in other European countries as soon as reporting functions are operational in local languages.
The vendor has finally introduced its partner program, Business First. Very classical, it offers resellers, among others, marketing tools, rebates or bid protection. More original : if the reseller wishes, it may manage directly after sales services for its clients’ PCs and notebooks. The vendor is also about to open a partner portal, where resellers will be able to access marketing or sales tools and even exchange depending on their centres of interest (technical, marketing, etc.) and, later, on their respective businesses and markets : “if a British reseller has a good idea for its local market, why not indeed share it and try it in other countries”, says O’Donoghue.
The vendor plans to find around 50 partner resellers in each main European country, and between 10 and 20 in smaller countries : “we plan to focus on quality resellers and we do not want them to fight with over-distribution”, stresses O’Donoghue. It will not be mandatory for a reseller to be a partner to sell Gateway products but, accordingly to O’Donoghue, only partners will be able to efficiently sell value-added products like Managed Services or, later, servers. Resellers will have to sell at least €1m of Gateway products to become partners.