Link2Support offers voice, e-mail and technical chat support as well as other value-added services. The company has 2,300 employees.

"By purchasing Link2Support we are adding more existing services for our channel partner customer base and our vendor customer base," said Chris Caldwell, senior vice president of global business development at Synnex, in Fremont, Calif., and the engineer of the Link2Support deal. "This company has built out a world-class infrastructure and support organization servicing many vendors."

Resource Library:

Read more here about a recent increase in market share for Synnex.

Many VARs have been looking to Synnex for a cost-effective way to offer support ever since the distributor acquired Concentrix in Sept. 2006, Caldwell said. Based in Rochester, N.Y., the integrated marketing company that is now part of Synnex provides call center, database analysis, and print-on-demand services to customers in the transportation, publishing, banking, health care and high technology industries.

Click here to view exclusive channel research from Amazon Consulting.

"Many of the partners we currently work with provide their own support in-house," Caldwell said. "But they are finding it difficult to offer a high level of deliverable support."

Caldwell noted that in an effort to provide such services to partners, a number of other distributors have "offshored" such services with third-party companies.

"Our strategy has been to have more control by doing it ourselves so we can have much closer control of deliverables," he said. "There are a number of opportunities for us with our existing customer base that have asked us for specific services."