As part of a drive to make its wide range of storage products more freely available in the reseller channel, the local subsidiary of IT giant, IBM, has granted distribution rights to storage specialist and member of the Siltek Technology Supply Chain, Intelligent Systems (IS).
Gerhard Grundlingh, product manager at IS, says the information age has created an almost insatiable thirst for storage capacity of various types, ranging from costly, high performance fixed disk subsystems to more cost-effective, removable solutions. "Adding the IBM agency to our portfolio extends the breadth of product and services we can offer," he notes.
From an IBM perspective, the appointment opens up markets Big Blue has not had access to in the past. "Resellers we have spoken to rate IS highly as a value-added distribution partner and have no hesitation in involving the company in satisfying their customers` storage needs," says Ben Gosling, manager: storage solutions for IBM in South and Central Africa.
"Appointing IS to distribute the full range of IBM storage products should allow us to tap into this market and grow our influence in the channel," he adds.
The quid pro quo for IS lies in the fact that IBM is underrated as a source of storage solutions for the open systems market. "The perception in the market is that IBM is only into high-end, mainframe-type storage. Nothing could be farther from the truth," explains Grundlingh.
"The IBM line up of storage products includes the hubs and adapters necessary for building SAN (storage area network) solutions and extends from standalone disk and tape drives to Shark and MagStar systems capable of storing many terabytes of data," he says.
Network-attached storage (NAS) systems also are part of the IBM portfolio, in particular, a product Gosling calls the NAS Gateway, which effectively connects the SAN to the LAN (local area network) allowing workstations direct access to SAN-based storage resources.
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A specialist distribution company in the SILTEK Technology Supply Chain Group, Intelligent Systems provides storage solutions that underpin many of the diverse business applications so prevalent in the business world today, including: Storage Area Networks, Data Warehousing, Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Document Imaging, e-Commerce and Hierarchical Storage Management.
The company holds distribution or sub-distribution rights to a broad range of storage technologies and products, including hard disk-based subsystems, optical technology, tape devices, high-performance connectivity and software management products. Intelligent Systems applies its considerable expertise to building solutions to satisfy individual storage requirements of a variety of specific business applications. The company can be contacted on +27 11 315 3120 or on its Web site at www.intsys.co.za
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