01732 759725 08 DISTRIBUTION Wouldn’t that be fantastic? If they were all up at the same time, we’d be doing brilliantly. But it does give us that security when a particular part of the market is down.” e The evolution of the workplace is driving growth “During lockdown, we stripped out our whole office and put new everything into every room to accommodate the workforce that we saw our team being in the future - a hybrid workforce that is in the office some of the time and at home some of the time. That technology investment, which other businesses are also making, is what’s driven a lot of the market developments that went well for us in 2023.” r Convergence brings opportunity for resellers “Now that we have a security offering, an AV offering, a UC offering, we can help resellers in each of those spaces explore those other areas. It’s a very converging marketplace; no longer are traditional partners staying in their traditional lanes. Everyone’s crossing over. Being a distributor that allows partners to cross over is, we consider, a real strength of ours.” t There are limits to diversification “We’re in so many areas now, you’ve got to be careful you don’t become a master of none. At the most basic level, what sits on the network and what endpoints can be driven from that, from a security point of view or a Teams point of view or a video point of view, covers most of the core markets in which we expect to see growth for the next few years. At the moment, our partners are telling us they want to grow with the things we’ve already got. I think that’s key. You don’t want to go too wild.” y Sometimes it’s great to be the challenger “We moved into the security marketplace about four years ago as a direct result of feedback from our resellers. We recruited a very good team and they continue to do well, putting security into some of our more traditional UC resellers…We’re the new entrants in that marketplace and that’s really exciting. In the UC space we tend to be the distributor that everyone comes after, because we’ve got big chunks of the market. It’s good to go into a marketplace where we don’t have that market share and can go out and tell people what we do and them get excited by us. Security’s got a really interesting feel to it, because it’s a new area for us in which we can see potential for exponential growth.” u Employees are the link between past and future “[The acquisition by Midwich has been very positive], but it’s vital for us to remain who we are. Nimans has been Nimans for many years and that is who we still are. A very large percentage of our workforce has worked for us for 10, 15, 20 years-plus. q You can’t launch 1,000 things at the same time “Going from being a privately owned company to part of a PLC, from being a distributor of £100 million-plus to part of a Group of £1 billion-plus has been really positive for us. We now have a global presence, which allows us to do multicountry rollouts, and new suppliers in the AV space have become available to us. We’ve taken on some of those suppliers, which has opened up new customer relationships. It’s all about doing it at the right speed. You can’t launch 1,000 things at the same time. We’re fortunate that we don’t have to do it all overnight and can evolve the business into where we want it to be in the next five and 10 years.” w There’s security in diversity “One of our core markets is headsets and after three years of continuous, pretty large growth since COVID, it settled down in 2023. The diversity we have in the business really made up for that and allowed us to grow all the same. It’s one of the advantages of being a diverse distributor. The other side of that is that not every market’s up at the same time. At the end of last year, Technology Reseller interviewed Paul Burn, Managing Director of Nimans, about his first year in charge of the distributor of unified communications, networks & infrastructure, AV and security products and services. Here are 10 things he told us. You can see the video interview in full on the Technology Reseller website (technologyreseller.uk). If you think you know Nimans… Paul Burn
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=