STORAGE software vendor Veritas is not ruling out a cull of its New Zealand distributors – nor is it ruling one in.
This is according to the company’s Sydney-based channel manager for New Zealand, Frank Zanotto.
“We are undecided at this point,” he says in response to a story Reseller News ran on April 16 about a review of the New Zealand and Australia channels.
Tech Pacific and Express Data confirmed they had replied to a mid-March Veritas letter, giving them about a week to describe their business.
Datastor, which Veritas reinstated as a distributor last month after 16 months as a sub-distributor, did not have to present it business case. Veritas acting managing director and channel head Bruce Lakin was due in New Zealand earlier this week as part of the review.
“This is a stock take at this point,” Zanotto says. “[Lakin] just wants to do a stock take at this point – not only of distributors but also resellers. He’s meeting and having some frank and open discussions.”
Asked if the review’s timing was unusual given Datastor’s recent appointment, Zanotto says: “Possibly nothing will change. Datastor hold their own. The solution sets we hold are fairly broad.”
At the end of 2002, Express Data replaced Datastor, which had been a Veritas distributor for 10 years.
