Our most recent announcement, which you’ll find posted on our website, is a joint communications effort with technology partner KACE – a Mountain View, California-based provider of systems management appliances. For those of you who care to check out the June 16 issue of CRN Magazine, you’ll find KACE (and its vaunted KBOX 1000) included in a list of “vendor offerings that concentrate on the channel’s success in the midmarket”. And if you want to experience the meaning of “customer evangelism”, I strongly recommend you spend a few minutes visiting the company’s website (www.kace.com).
The joint KACE/MPC announcement is a bit of a deviation for us when it comes to the types of business events we typically communicate. In PR parlance, the KACE release is what might be referred to as a “momentum announcement”. By contrast, the press releases you’ll see on our website are generally focused on product introductions, financial reports, and business milestones. Having said this, however, I think the KACE release is a very significant one for MPC – not so much for what it tells you about our products or operations, but for what it reveals about our marketing strategy following the acquisition of Gateway’s Professional business: which is to say, our focus on the mid-market and our leveraging of partnerships in addressing the “M” in “SMB”.
In the first paragraph of the joint announcement, KACE refers to the “combination of MPC’s strong distribution and singular focus on the professional market and KACE’s award-winning appliance-based solution (that) allows professional organizations to save time and money…”. Greg Wolff, our area vice president of product marketing, elaborates on this by stating a common goal of both companies: “to provide customers with solutions that reduce complexities within their computing environments…which enables our customers to obtain better total-cost-of-ownership value for their desktop and notebook computers.”
The fact is, MPC’s value proposition for the mid-market revolves around providing enterprise-class solutions that meet genuine IT challenges – challenges affecting organizations that lack the luxury of big budgets or staff to address them. No one states this better than MPC/KACE customer, David Smart (director of MIS for Community Hospice of Texas), who is quoted in the announcement saying that both MPC and KACE “focus on the needs of IT departments like ours which are complex, yet understaffed and budget-constrained.”
This aspect of our mid-market strategy is equally apparent in other IT solutions that have been introduced by MPC within the past 12 months. These include MailFRAME, an appliance-based e-mail archiving solution that is gaining strong endorsement across all our market segments (see the case study associated with MailFRAME on the City of Southlake, Texas), and DataFRAME 2112, an iSCSI SAN appliance that takes a standards-based, building block approach to server storage. These products also share another attribute with the KACE relationship: both incorporate industry-leading technologies from MPC partners. In the case of MailFRAME, our technology partner is NorthSeas; in the case of DataFRAME 2112, our partner is FalconStor. And from the perspective of each of these companies, the motivation for choosing MPC as a “go-to-market” partner is our strength in delivering end-to-end solutions to the mid-market. In fact, MPC is KACE’s largest national partner and distributor for the KBOX.
The CRN article I mentioned in the first paragraph, “Race to the Midmarket”, notes that major vendors are focusing more of their attention on the mid-market, and as a result, “solution providers determined to grow their business in an uncertain economy are adjusting their business models to better cultivate relationships with midsize business.” The good news for MPC is that we chose that very strategy long ago as our business model focus.
1 Comment
June 25, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work