D&H: Mobility, Storage Drive Double-Digit Growth

D&H, a private company, had sales "just shy" of $3 billion in its fiscal year, said Dan Schwab, co-president of the Harrisburg, Pa.-based company.

"It's all organic [growth] and it's based on our service model, which is a focus on demand generation and solution-selling that really benefited us," Schwab said.

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Last December, D&H said it expected to end the calendar year with a 14 percent increase in sales to $2.8 billion.

D&H reported sales of about $2.6 billion last year, and strong demand for mobility products including tablets, notebooks and Ultrabooks led the way in fiscal 2012, Schwab said. D&H spent much of the year trumpeting the features of mobility products, including a showcase last August that let solution providers rate different models.

"Most vendors clearly have evolved their mobility [strategy] with different devices. The bring-your-own-device paradigm is going on and more companies are coming out with great mobile devices that need mobile security, mobile storage, mobile accessories. It's driving more mobile networks. Everything mobile is a key driver," Schwab said.

About the only mobile category D&H doesn't really touch is the smartphone itself, or the carrier services around it. Schwab said D&H doesn't have much interest in those spaces because it's hard to add value with current carrier models. "We have everything around the phone," he said.

In addition to storage, Schwab pointed to other mature markets including power protection and printers as growth drivers. Those categories, as well as notebooks, tablets, desktops and telecommunications solutions, all grew at least 20 percent in sales compared to fiscal 2011.

"We saw some surprising growth in storage despite hard drive issues. We were able to find opportunities for our vendor partners to really drive some products into the SMB market that they weren't as deeply penetrated in," Schwab said.

Server storage solutions, solid state drives and network attached storage were especially strong among small-business solution providers, Schwab said.

For the current fiscal year, D&H is "doubling down on the 'S' [small] business," Schwab said. "We're really focused on activating those resellers and investing in training and education," he said.

Finally, Schwab expects a big push around Microsoft's Windows 8 this year and expects the release of the OS to further drive mobile solutions and more complementary growth in PCs, storage and more.