Custom Systems Best Sellers: Keyboards

Keyboards may not be first on the minds of custom system builders as they're putting together solutions for customers, but they are the gateway through which customers interact with their machines and the options available to them are more extensive than you might think.

Customers have choices beyond black or white. Do they want wired or wireless keyboards? Do they have jobs where the function keys become a factor? Would a media key make sense?

Those are some of the questions that vendors such as Logitech Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Adesso Inc., face when designing their keyboard products to help system builders make custom truly a step above out-of-the-box solutions. Best-selling vendor Logitech saw the biggest increase in market share between 2006 and 2007, from 33.5 percent to 39.3 percent. Microsoft came in with 24.6 percent of the market, and IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard and Adesso rounded out the top five, according to NPD Group's Distributor Track, which keeps track of sales through distribution.

For Huib Ponssen, product marketing director, business products group, for Fremont, Calif.-based Logitech, market share is the product of its company's attention to detail.

"We design our products for productivity, comfort and collaboration," he said. "It's all about industry standard. It's also [a matter of] comfort and then its all about the workspace. The workspace has been changing rapidly. A few years ago, you had people that worked at a desk with a desktop computer and clearly we see a trend towards the use of notebooks. They're not only for the mobile traveler anymore, they're now for the inter-office commuter who goes with a notebook from meeting to meeting."

For the professional market, IT managers want IT-friendly products so Logitech delivers its keyboards without any software drivers, he said. Customers also want hot keys to be able to open digital content that arrives in e-mail with a single keystroke. "Those can be controlled by the keyboard and those are natively designed around the Windows OS XP and Vista," he said.

For Michael Juco, a network administrator with Matrix Information Systems, a system builder in San Diego, Microsoft is the keyboard of choice.

"We stick with Microsoft," he said. "We're a Microsoft certified partner, so we resell all of their stuff. As long as we sell enough of their products, we get a discount and we get some extra support from them."

While there are perks for the system builder in choosing a powerhouse like Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, customers, he said, often aren't very picky. "Customers don't care. They pretty much just want it in either black or white. That's their preference," Juco said. What do whitebox shoppers tend to choose? "All the ones we send out now are black," he said, noting, "Sometimes we'll get requests for a wireless one, but normally that's just for [business] owners. They want their worker to have something that gets on the Internet that isn't too fancy. They want something that works."