Tech Data Launches Health-Care Business Unit

The distributor plans to develop repeatable solutions for electronic medical records, mobility, data center optimization, network security, content management, physical security and digital signage, all geared toward doctors, hospitals and other health-care clients, said Joe Quaglia, senior vice president of marketing at Tech Data.

Tech Data spent nine months developing the program and Quaglia acknowledged that other distributors have been quicker to get health-care programs to market.

"You can't rush to a strategy. Selling health care is not as easy as selling networking gear into an SMB account," Quaglia said at Tech Data's TechSelect conference at Walt Disney World. "This is not a commodity sale. It's a highly specialized, highly trained environment to sell to doctors and clinics. Our focus is to translate vendor solutions to the right IT resellers focused on health care to get to as many doctors as possible."

Quaglia said Tech Data initially plans to focus its efforts on a core group of about 500 solution providers that sell regularly to health-care clients. The distributor's data suggests it has about 3,500 total VARs selling to health care, even though Quaglia said every reseller usually raises their hand when asked if they sell to health care.

"This is a category where you can't go deep into thousands and thousands of solution providers. You've got to find the right group already selling into health care, that already have relationships with doctors. Fortunately, our data mining captures end-user information and we already know the right resellers," Quaglia said.

Tech Data has about 10 vendors ready to participate in a health-care SBU, though he declined to name them. In addition, Tech Data is looking at additional manufacturer partners that offer health-care focused solutions.

What Tech Data won't do, at least not initially, is get very granular in looking at partners and solutions, said Barb Miller, vice president of government, technical and integration services at Tech Data. In other words, Tech Data isn't ready to look for X-ray application developers or other niche ISVs.

"There are zillions of [health-care] software developers. If it's just solving a very small portion of the market, probably not," she said. "We'll cross vendors that we already have on our line card with [manufacturers] of things like washable keyboards and medical ruggedized laptops so we have a mobile computing solution [for health care]."

Tech Data is planning to showcase health care solutions in its Clearwater, Fla., solutions center as part of the TechMed array of programs and services. "We hope to have variety of different rooms: a patient room, a registration center, a lobby where digital signage is," Miller said.

In addition, the distributor already has a Web resource center focused on health care and it plans to partner with a grant-writing service to help resellers and their customers win government funding for EMR or other health-care solutions.

Tech Data cites Gartner numbers that show the health-care provider industry will spend $81 billion on IT in 2010 and that Input, a government spending tracking firm, says the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will devote $22.8 billion to health-care IT over the next six years.

"In the end, if we're not selling lot of equipment and solutions to doctors, we haven't done our job. Our strategy is going to be focused on making sure we have all the right ingredients to get after the most doctors in solving electronics records systems, document management and more," Quaglia said.