CommsPlus Distribution and BTC Wholesale, two Australian tech distributors with 25-year histories, have merged operations to trade as CommsPlus Distribution (CommsPlus). The new company will offer unified communications and collaboration solutions, including end-to-end tech provision and support to its combined 500 plus partners in Australia and Oceania.
CommsPlus Distribution is a technology distribution company that delivers communications products and services to resellers throughout the country. On the other hand, BTC Wholesale has long been recognised as a wholesale distributor in the collaboration space, focusing primarily on offering clients headsets, devices, audio visual (AV) and meeting room solutions.
Why did the two companies combine their businesses?
Commenting on the merger, Paul Bailye, Group CEO at the new CommsPlus Distribution, revealed that the last few years saw a natural melding of priorities between the distributors, which prompted the merger to bring stronger services and solutions to the channel.
“Over the last few years BTC Wholesale has invested in building a suite of products and a portfolio of network partners, moving from the peripheral side of unified communications towards collaboration solutions – a market which globally grew by 11.4% last year,” he said.
“It made sense for us to join forces for greater scale, to leverage synergies, increase our footprint and bring a wider range of products and services to our almost doubled partner base. Key to this is unified communications, collaboration and audio-visual solutions.”
Additionally, Bailye also said that the increase in vendor brands the companies represent will allow CommsPlus Distribution to ultimately meet the needs of the growing number of managed service providers (MSPs) in its partner base, which now comprises 25%.
“Our business has traditionally been aligned to communications service providers (CSPs) but given the speed of managed service providers coming online it’s important we approach them with solutions that create new opportunities and enable them to build and re-build products, and the same applies for communications service provider partner base,” he said.
What is the market offering of the combined business?
“As well as providing professional services and bill-on-behalf offerings, we’re aligning with the fact cloud-based unified communications is now more accessible, which we’re addressing with more SaaS and subscription based products and a new eCommerce marketplace to enable partners to consume products they way want to – distribution without disruption.”
“This enables partners with the ability to let clients adopt innovations and capabilities at their own pace, regardless of whether they’ve got on-premises, cloud or hybrid solutions in place.”
Along with managed service providers and communications service providers, CommsPlus Distribution’s partner base comprises of audio visual integrators, system integrators and a growing number of service providers. The new business will focus on three pillars:
- Unified communications, including on-premises and private, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS)
- Collaboration, across meeting rooms, Professional Audio Visual, health, and education, headsets and displays
- Devices, including networking, Wi-Fi, ATA’s peripherals and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) handsets.
