Four months after its launch, officials with Staples Technology Solutions, the business-to-business division of Staples Inc. that is competitive with VARs and MSPs, are reporting strength in sales to a number of verticals, including biotech, professional services, and other businesses with high human capital.
“Those organizations don’t like downtime,” said Jim Lippie, vice president of Staples Network Services, the side of Staples Technology Solutions that serves SMB clients. “They want employees to be productive 100 percent of time. They want to make sure someone is maintaining their computer environment so their employees can be productive.”
Staples Technology Solutions caters to companies from SMBs to Fortune 1000 organizations offering services such as printer fleet management and data center solutions, as well as network services and desktop technology products.
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Staples formed Staples Technology Solutions from the acquisition of two businesses: office supplies wholesaler Corporate Express in 2008 for $2.7 billion and MSP Thrive Networks in 2006 for an undisclosed sum.
Lippie said the SMBs that Staples Network Services (formerly Thrive Networks) serves have 10 to 250 employees, with the average having 40 employees and spending $2,800 month on products and services. He said that in September, officials started seeing “a lot more momentum in small businesses making investments in technology,” upgrading servers, security, and operating systems, and buying new computers. Year-over-year growth is at 15 percent, he said.
“It’s not hockey stick type growth, but it is significant, and our companies will continue to make investments because they have to,” he said. “Today’s small businesses need technology to run.”
On the enterprise side of Staples Technology Solutions, the company is seeing strong traction in their service offerings, including data center cleaning, secure media destruction, and printer maintenance, said Steve Suesens, category manager for Staples Technology Solutions.
The industries showing the greatest strength and growth for Staples Technology Solutions are financial institutions, and health-care and retail organizations, he said. Staples Technology Solutions offers a comprehensive line of point-of-sale devices, including cash registers and credit card machines, as well as back-office supplies and hardware that widely distributed retail organizations use, he said.
Staples Technology Solutions, with headquarters in Deerfield Beach, Fla., has 30 sales locations and six distribution centers across the country. Staples Network Services is located in Lawrence, Ma., and Staples Inc. is based in Framingham, Ma.
While Staples Technology Solutions does not use the services of subcontractors in the New England market, it does subcontract with OnForce, based in Lexington, Ma., to perform technical services in other parts of the country, Lippie said.
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