Frontline Distribution Ltd, the Basingstoke, Hampshire company 49%-owned by Computer 2000 GmbH of Munich, which bills itself as the UK’s largest trade-only computer distributor, is to offer Digital Equipment Corp workstations in place of Sun Microsystems Inc from next month, in a move aimed at building up DEC’s commercial Unix channels. Frontline was the first in the world to sign up for a Sun distribution deal back in April 1990, and was Sun’s second biggest customer in the UK. It claims to have been responsible for 12.5% of Sun’s indirect sales last year. News of the split first surfaced back in October. Frontline says it would have been happy to continue with the deal, but that Sun felt that margins were too tight. Sun itself says that it was not unhappy with Frontline, but that the business models of both companies were diverging, with Sun moving towards a single master reseller – Technology Plc of Warrington, Lancashire servicing a few authorised business centres and a range of resellers. Although Frontline investigated the Sparc clonemakers, it plumped for DEC because of its existing relationships with the Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Microsoft Corp, both tied in with DEC through the Advanced Computing Environment consortium. With DEC increasingly keen on exploiting the market for Microsoft’s NT on workstations, Frontline, which says it sold UKP1.8m of Windows and Windows-based applications last year, looks a good bet. The focus is commercial, rather than technical, and Frontline says it will be pitching the DEC product line hard at its former Sun customers. The two will be pitching together for business at the Windows Show this week: it opens tomorrow, February 18, and runs through to Friday at London’s Olympia.
