Synnex Calls On Maxtor

Synnex plans to carry Maxtor's Atlas SCSI drives for enterprise applications; MaXLine premium ATA and Serial ATA drives for midline and near-line secondary storage enterprise applications; DiamondMax drives for desktop PCs, consumer electronics and emerging market applications; and Maxtor OneTouch external drives.

The addition of Maxtor, Milpitas, Calif., is key to Synnex's growing system builder business, said Steve Ichinaga, vice president of the systems integration division at Synnex.

The Fremont, Calif.-based distributor is looking to add more vendors for system builders and is building a process to give component manufacturers a view of the actual users of the products, Ichinaga said.

"We're concentrating on selling directly to the point of integration. System builders in the past saw drive [manufacturers] dump their product in the channel to a few big guys, who would then sell it anywhere. The problem was there is no visibility to the actual customer," Ichinaga said. "More and more vendors want to sell directly to the guys that integrate, [and] we have that POS data to send back to them."

That visibility should help system builders receive better service from manufacturers, said Mohan Vachani, CFO of Nexsan Technologies, a system builder in Woodland Hills, Calif.

"When [supply] goes very tight, we have to have disk drives. We try to go everyplace we can find, but we are leery without knowing the original source. If you go to the aftermarket, you never know if warranties will apply. If Synnex can supply us with product on time and at a good price, we will increase our relationship with them," he said.

Maxtor is a key addition for Synnex, which is looking to compete more with larger distributors Ingram Micro and Tech Data, said Brian Alexander, vice president of equity research, technology distribution, at Raymond James and Associates.

"We typically do not emphasize line-card additions, but %85 part of the growth story is that Synnex does not have authorization from all of the major suppliers that the larger distributors have," Alexander said. "Maxtor is one of the larger suppliers that Synnex did not have previous authorization to distribute. Cisco [Systems], Sony and many of the security software vendors are other potential vendor adds [for Synnex] down the road."