VARs Pan CompUSA Plan
“It ended up being a flash in the pan, and nothing ever came of it,” said Brian Deeley, manager of Graymar Business Solutions, a solution provider in Timonium, Md., with annual revenue in excess of $6.5 million. “The few calls that we got were an extension of the break/fix stuff, which we had seen before anyway, and none of the higher-end networking solutions that they had discussed.”
Tom Derosier, co-owner of CPUGuys, a Hanson, Mass., solution provider, agreed. “It’s a plan that never materialized,” he said.
But George Coll, CompUSA’s vice president of business services and corporate strategy, said services partnerships with VARs are resulting in “explosive” growth for the retailer. He pointed out that CompUSA redesigned its Web page last month to tout its new services for small businesses, including data storage management, data security and wireless networks.
“It would be impossible for anybody to provide on a nationwide basis the kinds of services we say we are offering to both home and business customers without having a very robust network of partners,” Coll said.
Last August, Dallas-based CompUSA briefed VARs on its Techknowledgist Services program, a strategy to supplement the chain’s existing in-store and on-site services team with VARs skilled in areas such as wireless and wired networks, storage and VoIP.
Coll said the program addresses the need for the retailer to provide rapid response at a great value.
He said the effort remains on track and that his team now manages the third-party service provider relationships and dispatches calls through OnForce, a New York-based online network of service providers that previously did business as ComputerRepair.com.
Kevin Ross, owner of ChubbeSoft Technology, a services-only VAR in Everett, Wash., with annual revenue of $200,000, said he is doing $3,000 to $5,000 in services revenue each month through his partnership with CompUSA. “I get a lot of server setups and networking through a server,” he said, noting that about 70 percent of his CompUSA business is with home users and the remaining 30 percent with small- business customers.
The expectation, as some VARs say it was presented to them, was that CompUSA had a lot of potential business coming in the door that it was losing because it didn’t have the expertise on the services side to provide solutions the customers needed, Deeley said.
Based on his initial conversations with the retailer, Deeley had been hoping for as much as $15,000 a month in incremental services revenue. “They wanted VARs to partner with them to do the solutions side and CompUSA would do the hardware side, and it sounded like a nice marriage,” he said.