According to a highly placed source, computer cables can generate more than triple the acquisition costs for solution providers.
Dave Walsh, the former Ingram Micro and Blue Range Technology senior executive, told CDN that resellers average more than 25 per cent margins from cables and that some others make more than 50 points. Walsh, who was just appointed country manager for Dayton, Ohio-based Cables To Go, a computer, data-communications and AV connectivity manufacturer, said the challenge he has is to educate the VAR community that cables shouldn’t be an afterthought when putting together a IT solution for customers.
Cables To Go is a division of Lastar Inc., established in 1984. The company has been pushing the development of cables into key growth markets such as healthcare and education.
Walsh’s mandate is to create new markets for Cables To Go in the healthcare and education space, along with digital signage.
“I am going to figure out what works for Cables To Go in Canada and take as much share of wallet as I can. There are markets we haven’t touched like digital home, pro AV and system integrators,” he said.
Another area Walsh wants to build its Cables To Go’s inventory in Canada, and he said he would be working with the top distributors in Canada for this. He’ll also set targets for resellers and drive demand generation through new marketing efforts.
Walsh added that he intends to streamline claim forms for the channel.
Currently Cables To Go’s main channel partners are direct market resellers, but he plans to work on the company’s channel network to grow it and to push it towards the healthcare and education verticals.
“Healthcare is a $3.3 billion dollar opportunity with 18 per cent of it in just hardware. One to two per cent of that 18 per cent is in cabling. That’s a six to 12 million opportunity,” Walsh said, citing a Compass Intelligence study.
Cables To Go has developed RapidRun, a branded cabling system specific for healthcare. RapidRun is also ideal for the connected classroom, conference rooms, home theatres, video displays and other in-wall applications. The key to RapidRun, Walsh said, is that the cabling system dramatically reduces the likelihood of return to service calls due to faulty field terminations. RapidRun has signal types that support runner cables, VGA, composite video, S-Video, component video, HDMI and DVI.
But that’s just one solution from Cables To Go, which sports more than 6,000 different products.What also differentiates Cables To Go is that they will build custom configured cables for special installations, Walsh said.
Follow Paolo Del Nibletto on Twitter: @PaoloCDN.
