Ingram Micro may not have an official booth at CES, but the IT distributor will have a showroom and suites at the Monte Carlo hotel in Las Vegas during the giant consumer electronics extravaganza, turned all-around tech meeting place. And it’s not the company’s first year at the event.
Jeffrey Friederichs, Ingram Micro’s director of global marketing and North American sales, believes that CES is just as good if not better for meeting up with resellers than Comdex was during that show’s heyday.
“Initially the intent of Comdex was to attract dealers, and then it became a new technology show,” he said. “To me it ceased to have the same buzz in [the] late 90s.” That’s when the value of technology came from how you integrated IT and consumer technologies together, he said.
“CES did a better job of merging the technologies.”
Ingram Micro will be talking about its V7 house brand during the event, according to Ingram Micro V7 executives Friederichs and Rainer Kozlik. V7 is the distributor’s own private label product line, available to VAR partners around the world.
V7 is primarily related to the PC, said Kozlik, vice president and general manager of the V7 organization, but it also includes products such as portable navigation devices, Friederichs added. These kinds of products have both strong commercial (fleet management, for example) and consumer applications.