eSP - IT Solution Providers in Europe

In an all-cash merger for an equity value of about $252 million and a transaction value of nearly $594 million, Avnet takes over Don Bell's Bell Micro.

Don (shown in photo from our interview several years ago) founded his company in 1988. Bell now has sales of  $3+ billion and 1900 employees.

The company, which operates both a distribution and single tier reseller business, offers a portfolio of storage, computing, software and networking products for broadcast, AV and IT industries. In 2009, the single tier business represented 15% of total sales while revenues from EMEA were 41%.

Avnet now expects revenue for the March fiscal quarter for its Electronics Marketing (EM) Group to be in the range of $2.75 billion to $2.85 billion as compared with the prior range of $2.55 billion to $2.85 billion, and the revenue at its Technology Solutions Group to be in the range of $1.70 billion to $1.85 billion as compared with the prior range of $1.55 billion to $1.85 billion.

In distribution, the big get bigger. And in this case, Avnet is also buying Bell's experience in AV and broadcast, with the thought to move in additional product ranges from its IT base.

Go Avnet

Providers of communications and high-tech products and services give away, on average, 28% of the technical service and support they deliver to business customers each year, because they lack insight into what customers are entitled to receive.

Accenture research explored the state of business customer service in the communications services, communications equipment, electronics and high-tech industries, querying more than 650 senior executives from 11 countries.

“While there are some legitimate reasons why providers might give away technical service—especially to their biggest, most important customers—lacking enough customer insight about what customers are entitled to receive is not a good enough reason to give it away at no charge,” says Brian Sprague, a senior executive in Accenture’s Customer Service and Support practice.

“Providers must obtain the customer insight needed to make more informed decisions about whether to give away the service and, if so, to whom, or if they should charge for these services. In today’s challenging economic climate, businesses need to find innovative ways to grow and improve their revenues.”

The research uncovered another sizable problem. Nearly 30% of business customers surveyed are considering switching to another provider because they are dissatisfied with the quality of customer service they receive.

IDC European Vertical Markets releases a report which defines the clusters that best describe the Western European SMB environment.

This study highlights four groups of homogeneous SMBs based on common IT deployment and propensity to invest in their IT future:

• The laggards (16%) have a basic infrastructure and limited willingness to invest in the near term.
• Wait-and-see companies (36%) have a solid deployment of IT but prefer to wait until technology is mature and widely present in the market before engaging in other significant IT investments.
• IT-oriented companies (21%) have a solid IT deployment and a high propensity to invest further.
• The fast followers (16%) cluster despite a lower-than-average adoption of IT is the most keen to close the technology gap with early adopters.

This IDC study is based on the results of IDC's European vertical markets survey, carried out in 2009 in the top five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K.) among 1193 SMBs with 20–499 employees.

The sample, representative of the Western European SMB marketplace, was segmented into four clusters through a k-means cluster analysis, which allowed putting together companies with similar characteristics in terms of their current IT engagement and IT propensity.

Go Clustering Western European SMBs: An IDC Survey