Following Hitachi's termination of its 21-year relationship with South African distributor Persetel, the high-end storage vendor has founded and appointed a new distributor - Shoden Data Systems - to distribute its storage range. Comparex, Persetel's holding company, has sided with Hitachi competitor EMC.
Hitachi entered the South African market in 1979 through Persetel, but terminated the relationship in February. At that time, Comparex Holdings announced a five-year global agreement with EMC to resell its storage products. Due to a lack of local Hitachi representation, a group of ex-Persetel staff members discussed the possibility of setting up a local distributor's office with Hitachi, thus forming Shoden.
Fanie van Rensburg, an ex-Persetel employee, heads up Shoden as MD.
Currently based in Rivonia, the new company is planning to expand nationally, and has started to forge local alliances with some of Hitachi's global partners, as well as South African storage companies.
Hitachi says it chose Shoden due to its technical skill-set, which will allow service and support to be delivered directly by Shoden.
According to an open letter from John Traffinder, CEO of Hitachi Europe, Middle East and Africa: "Shoden offers a comprehensive maintenance capability including warranty support, spare parts, preventative maintenance, repair service and out proprietary Hi-Track remote service tool - all with the latest levels of functionality and micro-code."
Shoden will also distribute products from US-based connectivity device vendor Inrange, a portfolio that includes ESCON and Fibre Channel switches for within the data centre, as well as Channel Extensions and dense wave division multiplexing for storage WANs.
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