Five Questions With Jeff Medeiros, President of rs-unix

VB:

Medeiros: The relationship just keeps getting better and better every year. I think it's great. It's getting to the point where we're running out of superlatives to describe it. IBM and Avnet don't do everything the solution providers ask them to, but we can definitely see our fingerprints on a lot of what they do.

VB: You had strong growth in 2003, nearly 50 percent, but a few years ago, rs-unix struggled. Were you thinking of getting out of the business at all?

Medeiros: Things were really lean a few years ago. I was looking at all options, not necessarily getting out of the business altogether. But when things slow down like that, what do you do? You have to have an escape hatch. We looked at selling [the business], but at the end of the day the best option was to ride it out. And now we've bounced back, and then some.

VB: There have been many big mergers and acquisitions in the solution-provider community this year. What do you see happening with this trend?

Medeiros: I think it's competitive VARs that are trying to buy their way into new businesses. I think the strategy for a lot of guys may even be to build themselves up and then sell themselves to a larger organization... But I don't see too many traditional solution providers coming together like that.

VB: What's the mood in San Francisco these days?

Medeiros: It has picked up quite a bit. It's amazing; it's really a night-and-day contrast to two years ago...we've got a lot smarter, and our customers sure got a lot smarter, too. That's the difference between today and the late-1990s boom.

VB: What about IT spending overall?

Medeiros: IT spending is coming back, but...slowly. Everyone is waiting for the big infrastructure refresh and positioning themselves... So it's going to happen.