French services company APX is to act as the distributor for NEC in EMEA, handling logistics, solutions design and integration, and support.

"NEC was facing the choice to have a partner able to work with them not only as they did with their previous partner for the core call intervention, but also covering the logistics and all the relationship with the resellers network, and that's the reason for their choice of APX," CEO of APX, Noel Saille told IT Europa.

The partnership comes in line with NEC's international strategy to intensify its activities around Infrastructures. "We wanted a provider with the heart of expertise Services oriented infrastructure, in order to meet the needs of our new strategy," explained Tong Chhor, Senior VP EMEA at NEC. "APX will provide the NEC's servers and storage service, as well as the service continuity of NEC's PC and laptop installed-base that represent a stock of more than 1.5 million appliances under warranty."

With €180m revenues, 1400-strong, APX who's part of the Getronix-KPN group that holds 10% of its capital is only present in France. However, the Global Workspace Alliance (GWA) - an alliance between CompuCom in the United States, TechnoCom in Spain and Portugal, APX in France and Getronics in other European countries - enables it to cover the international needs of its customers. In addition, APX owns its own multilingual European helpdesk that it was able to adapt to NEC's needs.

"This partnership is a recognition of our expertise regarding desktops, servers, support and managed services. It's bringing us volume and opportunities, since it's a €10m contract, and the fact that it's in the long term (three to five years) is a real plus," continued Saille. "At the same time, on our infrastructure business, we'll be able to use NEC's technology for some specific things such as full tolerance solutions, but that's not the core of our agreement, just a part of it."

"This is a new type of demand coming on the market: NEC is looking to focus on what it does best, but it needs a strong and flexible service; and to be able to do that, it needs a dedicated player, able to provide to all its customers," he concluded. If done well, NEC's customers will benefit from better prices as well as a better service portfolio than it would have been able to achieve by itself.

Also in line with NEC's 100% indirect strategy announced a few months earlier, NEC announced today the signing of a new partnership with value-added distributor ETC in France, for the promotion and sales of its softwares, servers and storage solutions.

www.apx.fr
www.nec-computers.fr
www.etc-dist.fr

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