Reseller plans to hone its business with tier-one vendors as it moves to consolidate

Security and managed services reseller Netstore admits its vendor line up will see heavy casualties as it looks to do more with fewer partners.

The VAR aims to get “under the ribs” of a core group of allies, including Microsoft, Juniper, Symantec, Clearswift, Cedar and Agresso.

Ray Ottey, partnerships manager at Netstore, said: “We are looking at the vendors that are consolidating and feel that is what we should be doing too. We want to do more with our core products and lose some of those nice-to-have niche players.”

Ottey said Netstore would talk to its core vendor and distribution partners in January with a view to setting up consortia or executive forums around industry hot topics.

“The market has matured to a point where resellers asking vendors for money for an event is passé. We want to put together 12-month campaigns dealing with the issues we are seeing out there and present a united front to customers,” he said.

Despite Netstore having recently admitted that the integration of past acquisitions had been “more challenging than anticipated”, Ottey claimed the reseller would not be scared to splash its cash again.

“We have aggressive plans to get to £100m turnover in three years and we certainly would not discount acquisitions,” Ottey said.

Mukesh Gupta, managing director of security distributor e92plus, said: “Netstore is focusing on the tier-one vendors, which makes a lot of sense. However, neglecting the tier-two vendors would be wrong, as they are the ones that will bring in more retained margin on single transactions.”