FileMaker has announced the appointment of Tech Pacific as its sole distributor throughout Australia and NZ, a move that will bring relief to a currently dry channel.
Dealers will be able to order stock from Tech Pac as of today, with the first orders conservatively expected to roll out by July 31.
The contract, which was stitched up in a lightning fast deal, will put $3 million in Tech Pac's coffers, not accounting for FileMaker's stable 30 per cent annual growth.
"Tech Pacific is a good bid for us," said Steve McManus, FileMaker general manager, Asia Pacific. "It is a lot larger than Dataflow but give excellent coverage. It's very strong in the SME area and very strong in business licensing. Our product is focused on business work groups and that's a very good fit with the distribution model Tech Pacific has."McManus believes the appointment of Tech Pac will mean an improved level of service for resellers. "The service to the dealers definitely dropped off with Dataflow from September last year, so I expect the dealers will welcome this appointment," he said. "One of the processes in deciding which distributor we went to was to canvas key dealers both on Windows, in the business area, and on Macintosh, and see who they would recommend...They told us themselves that they like Tech Pac's marketing strategy."As the demise of Dataflow left the software developer without a major link in its channel five weeks ago, FileMaker has been selling products out of its customer service group on a box-by-box basis, just to get stock to dealers.
McManus says he has a few more grey hairs following the frantic hunt for a replacement distributor. "The leadup to the introduction of the GST was the most unprecedented sales period that I can recall ever," he told ARN. "We were doing more than $200,000 a week in the leadup to the end of June, which is a lot of box-by-box sales."An additional bonus to the Tech Pac partnership is its possible fit in the Asian markets but McManus said this is not in the immediate future.