Standing up only 24 hours before the news broke of JWP Inc’s agreed bid for Businessland Inc, Ingram Micro D Inc vice-president Bruce Fredrickson, speaking at the recent Interactive Systems Developers Forum in San Jose, was perhaps being slightly more than prophetic when he stated that during the next 90 days we’ll see the most change in distribution channels since 1982-3, when IBM came into the market. Fredrickson, in charge of a distributor that is looking to do some $1,850m this year, said the trick to managing this change is to find out how to do it, and not to go broke in the process. The major causes of this shake up, he argues, are three-fold. First, the slump in Compaq Computer Corp’s fortunes, where the market changed and Compaq didn’t. He pointed to the effects of the emerging clone market pioneered by the likes of Advanced Logic Research Inc, AST Research Inc, Dell Computer Corp and Acer Corp. Second, he says, is Businessland’s slump and subsequent demise – which for the first time has allowed Apple and IBM publically to rethink their channels. They’ve apparently been doing it for some time on the quiet, and now Fredrickson expects the pair to announce new distribution strategies around the beginning of next month. Third cause, he says, is Apple’s entry into the low end of the market with the emergence of mass-marketing channels like superstores, which Apple is reckoned to be readying to use for its products. The mass merchant market will emerge as the largest, Fredrickson believes. He says Ingram Micro D, claimed to be the largest of three national distributors in the US – Merisel Inc and TechData Inc being the others – can now ship an order within 25 minutes of its receipt. The only problem, he says, is with some just-in-time products from the Japanese which, he says, don’t always arrive just-in-time. We’re a huge supermarket, he says, we’ve got to sell the staple bread, milk and eggs – the Ashton-Tate and Lotus, but supermarkets make their money on everything else: the delicatessen, the meat counter and the confectionary – like we do with Apple Mac, Microsoft Windows and mass storage products for example. If Unix is to succeed in this kind of market, he argues, it must win a battle for mindshare. With CISC, RISC, MS-DOS, OS/2 – and Unix -out there, the point is, he says, that value-added resellers understand Intel. They don’t understand RISC. Even though RISC has the sexy image, CISC has the channel. Image is the biggest problem for Unix, he argues, thank God for Motif and Open Look. – William Fellows
