In a “coals to Newcastle” move, Europlus Direct boss Jim Hart has said that his UK outfit is doing a roaring trade flogging IBM products in the US.
Chatting to the Yorkshire Post, Hart said that Europlus turned over £7.1m last year, with a rise to £8.2m forecast for 2013.
This year, Hart set up Europlus Direct International in Las Vegas so that it can buy IBM services very competitively in the US.
Hart said that a lot of the firm’s customers are European companies going into the US – and Europlus buys the services for them.
He said that there is huge potential in the US and he is hoping in 12-18 months the company can sell as much as $600,000- $700,000 in the US market.
His company started out as an IBM support services reseller, solely targeting the French market.
“I employed two French people and we got a contract with IBM France”, recalled Hart. “It basically provided us with a database of French IBM customers whose maintenance support was about to expire”.
He said that he was not interested in the service delivery side, he just sells. If a server goes down in Paris, it’s an IBM engineer that goes along, it’s not Europlus.
Europlus Direct’s target clients are firms which already trade internationally or which want to.
In 2010, it moved into distribution selling IBM maintenance contracts in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the firm also specialises in providing spare parts.
He said that it was dangerous for companies to only have one business model. Hart is looking at new areas with IBM, such as big data, and may become a reseller of that in the future.
