Toshiba's New Order Of Business

Mark Simons, vice president and general manager of Toshiba America&s Digital Products Division, Irvine, Calif., said the changes are geared toward gaining ground in the commercial space it began to lose market share in during the mid-1990s.

In particular, Simons tapped Jeff Barney as vice president of marketing and Jerry Lumpkin as vice president of channel business sales. Lumpkin is a former executive with Synnex and Ingram Micro.

“This is to [focus on] our B2B business,” Simons said. “We&ve lost some share in the B2B space.”

Unveiled two years ago and launched six months later, Toshiba&s build-to-order business for its commercial notebook lineup has steadily grown, said Simons. It now accounts for about 30 percent of Toshiba&s U.S. channel sales, and is driven primarily by a couple of hundred solution providers with deal sizes of between 50 and 100 units at a time.

Toshiba executives said a key driver of the program was feedback from the channel, specifically that delivery times on special orders through distribution was too long. By switching to a direct-to-reseller model, outside distribution, delivery times have improved, they said.

In addition, Simons said, more than 3,000 Toshiba engineers who were spread across multiple product and technology lines in Japan have now been integrated into one unit, providing new R&D focus and leverage for the vendor&s notebooks.

Toshiba, though, could see resistance from some channel corners. Joe Vaught, executive vice president and COO of PCPC, Houston, said he has seen no evidence that Toshiba has capitalized on opportunities such as IBM&s sale of its PC and notebook business to Lenovo. “If they can&t make headway when IBM and Lenovo are making changes,” Vaught said, “they&re not going to make headway.”