Morgen Engles. Following on from the sale of Logica to CSG, I was saddened to learn that yet another UK tech firm Specialist Distribution Group (SDG) was going to be swallowed up by another North American giant, Tech Data.
It’s especially saddening when “Considerably richer than you,” Sir Peter Rigby, has done such a good job with his hybrid model in the UK and Europe and was one of the thin red line of disties, Northamber being the other, that has been fighting back the tide of US corporate imperialism.
Although jumping jack cash, Sir Peter and crew will be dancing on their coffee tables with the stack of cash they will be getting, it reminded me of when my Distie, WMD, was snapped up by CHS back in the day.
I had a sad end of empire feeling that things would never be the same and thought that in the end customers would only really have a Coke and Pepsi choice from either Ingram Micro or Tech Data as consolidation and commoditisation has decimated the market of both big players and small players alike in the last 10 years.
This feeling was before cloud computing came on the scene and Far Eastern Manufacturers have the power they have today, of course.
These factors, many say, are the catalyst that is accelerating the feeding frenzy of the global players as they a) position their business units for cloud computing, and b) strengthen the front against potential gains from the Far Eastern Manufacturers (FEM).
The battle lines are being drawn right now and some wise old hands in the distribution market are already predicting that a lot of the FEM will not be reliant on US or Western distribution in the near future.
They are already accelerating their own massive datacentre growth for cloud services and offering competitively priced volume product to access these services.
When this happens it will threaten the dominance of the Western players in the market. As ever, I will be watching closely to see how the empire will strike back – in the meantime expect more of these sort of announcements.
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