CTX Ventures Into Verticals

Mark Anderson, director of sales and business development at CTX, announced the move during a panel discussion at CRN's Hall of Fame ceremony last week at the Computer History Museum in San Jose, Calif.

Anderson said CTX has a full range of industrial displays ready and has signed with eight representative firms in North America. The City of Industry, Calif.-based vendor is in the process of finalizing contracts with three more rep firms and a number of distributors in this space, Anderson said.

CTX reviewed the industrial market and realized it is not nearly as saturated as more traditional display markets the company currently serves, Anderson said. "Some of the players in this space we have bumped into before, but much of the market is untapped," he said.

CTX has three product lines to serve this market, which includes verticals such as medical, retail and hospitality industries.

The first line of products are open-frame monitors, flat-panel displays made of glass in an aluminum frame without traditional bezels or other features. CTX offers displays that range in size from 6.4 inches to 20 inches, each of which is available in five to 10 configurations, custom-built in the United States to customer specifications, Anderson said.

The second product line is a rack-mount series of displays. This line includes 1U drawer models with an LCD that pops up when the drawer is opened, as well as 8U or 9U panels that bolt directly onto a rack, he said.

The third line of displays, chassis panels, have a bezel but no base and are designed to be hung on walls, Anderson said.

"With this type of product, no one will call [broadline distributors like] Ingram Micro or Tech Data or Synnex " he said. "They will call an Avnet or an Arrow and say, 'This is what we need.' "

Dom Daninger, vice president of engineering at Reason, a Minneapolis-based solution provider, welcomed CTX's move. Reason typically has to order display components separately, Daninger said, "so if CTX does this, it might be nice to write one P.O., not three or four."