Acer America Puts Focus On Servers, Channel Program

The company, based here, focused on a limited line of two-way servers over the past 18 months and in June introduced a one-way Pentium 4-based server, said Frank Chang, product marketing manager for Acer America's Altos server line. The company plans to unveil a four-way Xeon-based server by the end of this month, a two-way Xeon server in August and a rack-mount Xeon server in the fall, he said.

Tom Barefoot, president of Universal Micro Systems, a Waitsfield, Vt.-based solution provider and a member of Acer's Reseller Advisory Council, said Acer America has a solid server line but had chopped off the top of the line for some time.

"I'm glad to see them coming back in," Barefoot said. "We tried to tell them at the time that other products come and go, but servers will always sell. They lost a lot of resellers at the time. Even we had to go to other suppliers for big servers."

Acer America taps the channel for nearly all of its sales but aims to recruit more solution providers, said Mark Hill, national channel sales director at the vendor. The company also enhanced its Web site by improving its online configurator. "If you haven't heard from Acer for a long time, we quite honestly have been developing the tools we need to support the channel," he said.

One Acer partner said Acer needs to better understand the U.S. market: "Acer has to stop building what they want and start building what we want."