5 Hot Products For SMB Customers

From security products enabled with artificial intelligence to the latest in printers, here’s a look at some key products for the SMB market.

D&H Distributing welcomed more than 900 partners to Hershey, Pa. to get face-to-face time with vendors and learn about what’s new for SMB-focused VARs and MSPS in 2019.

With security is top of mind for nearly all customers, it’s no surprise that’s a hot area for growth, said D&H Co-President Michael Schwab.

“I don’t know if you can have a conversation in today’s environment without having security pop up,” Schwab said. “Because it’s such a complicated area of the environment in which we serve today, we in many ways, pride ourselves on being the conduit of the manufacturers’ R&D and information flow that they can then provide out. We’re constantly evaluating new products and technologies to make sure we’re giving best-in-class solutions. Security is a big bet. The growth year over year is reflective of that fact.”

With cybersecurity top of mind for attendees, there were a number of vendors focused on bringing their solutions to the SMB environment. But that’s just one area of interest for SMB-focused solution providers. D&H has also formed a close relationship with Lexmark in the printer space, and the print vendor has a line of products targeted to the distributor’s SMB-minded partners.

Vertiv

Vertiv, which provides backup power and failsafe systems for datacenters, was spun out from the $4.3 billion division of Emerson Network Power in 2016 and bought by Platinum Equity. The company recently inked a deal with D&H Distributing to get better penetration in the SMB market, and next week the company will take the wraps off its GXT5 battery backup product.

“D&H is bringing a lot of reseller partners that we haven’t touched in the past. It’s been great so far,” said Chad Riseling, director of strategic channel accounts with Vertiv. “We do everything from AC power to DC power. Small cooling to very large cooling. Small power to very large power. We’ve been growing quite well. We’ve really put a lot of money into people products and processes … The big focus right now is on our single-phase power. Next week, we’re launching the next-generation of our GXT Line which is a single-phase UPS, GXT5. That’s one of the leading single-phase UPSs on the market today.”

Microduino

The Westlake Village, Calif. company founded in 2012 is making a push into the education market, by leaning on a curriculum that it says is built to Next Generation Science Standards.

“The advancement of ‘stuff that does really cool things’ is going to have to move forward and the first thing that teachers are going to look for are products that have a curriculum. They no longer can bring products in and say ‘I think I can teach this,’” said Bridgeman Carney, director of worldwide sales at Microduino.

He said the goal of Microduino -- which has a range of stackable building blocks, magnetic connectable blocks, among other toys, driven by Arduino and compatible with Lego, and Scratch -- is to give educators a cohesive set of devices that teach STEM progressively, grade by grade. With the products already deployed in 5,000 schools, and in front of 3 million students worldwide, Carney said there is a huge opportunity for resellers.

“We want to create a series of products so that one product melts into the other,” he said. “Right now schools have a little bit of mayhem where one third grade teacher will pick one product, and another teacher will pick another product. When they hand that class off to the fourth-grade teacher, it creates an uneven baseline. So what we’re touting is to make a smoother ramp, so that the hand offs get smooth from grade to grade.”

ESET – MSP Program

The cybersecurity company said its MSP program makes doing business with it easy by offering flexible licenses via a self-service portal, volume pricing to help scale businesses and reduce costs, as well as integrations with the top RMM and PSA tools on the market.

The company offers what it calls a “unique daily-billing, monthly invoicing model”, and gives MSPs the ability to add and remove seats instantly on their array of products including endpoint anti-virus solutions, mobile security, file security, and endpoint security.

ESET MSP Administrator gives partners the power to activate and disable individual products and licenses, track license usage in real time without the need to contact ESET, the company said. ESET also offers complimentary installation support service, to all new ESET MSP customers.

Sophos – Cloud Optix

Sophos Cloud Optix is an agentless, SaaS-based production that combines “deep security expertise” with artificial intelligence to deliver cloud security monitoring, analytics and compliance automation, the company said.

“Security is a difficult topic for small to medium sized business owners to tackle because they have so much of their time committed to running their business,” said Jordan Bray, distribution account manager, Sophos. “So our products are simple, they work together and the eliminate about 15 of the 20 of those check-boxes that you need to do from a security perspective.”

He said the Cloud Optix product optimizes and makes sure the public cloud environments and the security challenges that they face, are delt with easily.

“Our D&H counterparts said that as more small businesses are moving their resources out into the cloud, its becoming harder and harder to manage,” Bray said. “Our Cloud Optix product helps them by making it easy to scan, easy to tell if its in compliance, and easy to remediate any issues.”

Lexmark

The Lexington, Ky.-based printer company, which last year doubled down on targeting SMB customers, has enjoyed significant sales growth with D&H, according to one company official.

At the technology show, Lexmark displayed its new 2-Series -- a monochrome printer, and a monochrome multi-function device -- that is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than its entry level products, but built with the same robustness, and security as their larger counterparts. The two devices are specially geared for micro-SMBs and start ups with a few employees.

The 2-series is part of the company’s Go Line of products designed to help resellers win share among SMB customers in managed print services.