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Central Microsystems: The Venturetech Network Membership Advantage

As a charter member of VentureTech Network, Central Microsystems needs no convincing that belonging to VTN brings the kind of value to our business that far outweighs the investments of time or money a proactive membership requires.

A Québec-based customer of ours who is a leader in the steel industry was recently in acquisition mode of numerous smaller steel businesses in the United States. Being a publicly traded company, each of their three acquisitions had to be carried out with precision timing such that when each acquired company closed on Friday for the weekend, their entire IT infrastructure had to be ported over to new servers, software installed, tested and be on-line with the customer's Montréal head office by 8:00AM the following Monday morning.

Our installation team was comprised of three members, an accounting software specialist, our communication specialist and our MCSE. They would fly in to each location Friday afternoon, and by Monday morning the changeover had to be complete. Central Microsystems' role was to provide the required hardware, format each server and assure communication with the customer's Montréal server.

While not a technically challenging project, we soon realized that we were faced with rather large political and logistics challenges. Logistically, equipment had to be at each site on the day of the installation team's arrival, otherwise, three technical resources would sit idle and deadlines would be missed. The equipment was too large to carry with the installation team and trucking it from Canada could not guarantee a precise arrival time. On the political side, the chosen vendor(s) would not validate warranty coverage on their hardware if it were purchased in Canada and installed in the US. Our customer, on the other hand, wanted a single source with unified billing for all aspects of this project – and of course a manufacturer's warranty on all hardware.

We explored the possibility of Ingram Micro (US) billing our company and delivering the hardware to the American sites but we were again thwarted through manufacturers' authorization requirements, which Central Microsystems did not hold for the US market. Finally, we thought of leveraging our connections within VentureTech Network and called some VTN members in the US. The two members that we selected for their proximity to each project site could not have been more accommodating. They verified that all the hardware components were indeed available through Ingram Micro in the US, pricing was agreed upon, stock was reserved and delivery dates were confirmed. The US VTN members would invoice Central Microsystems and deliver the hardware to the designated sites in the US allowing pass-through of warranty and assuring on-time delivery.

Although the US portion of the project represented only about $35K in hardware sales, it did bring in an additional $16K in services billing – business that would have been entirely outsourced without VTN - and, to put everything into global perspective, the US work was a pivotal component of a larger local project worth over $800K in hardware sales and over $170K in service billings to that same customer.

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