West Midlands VAR Probrand says it has recorded “landmark half-year growth” following a transformation programme and the launch of an online marketplace for IT products and services.
The company says it has seen record year-on-year sales up 22% for the first half of 2018, and a 9% growth in profit. The company hasn't published the exact figures, but its last publicly available results show the firm had sales of £41m for the year ending 31 December 2016.
The latest results follow the merger of the company’s traditional IT reseller and cloud and managed IT services businesses in January 2017.
Probrand’s new “service oriented vision”, it said, has placed its marketplace platform “front and centre of the business”, onboarding buying communities, sales teams and vendors into a self-service environment, as well as integrating utility based pricing into its own managed services portfolio.
Probrand’s marketplace openly connects IT buyers with over 2,500 brands from distributors and vendors. Users benefit from live price and stock updates, price comparisons across suppliers, and visibility of personalised and special bid discounts.
Users can also configure, price and provision cloud and managed IT services from within the Probrand portfolio and those of third party suppliers.
Matt Ruskin, channel manager at Lenovo UK and Ireland, said: "The Probrand marketplace delivers efficiency and scale, driving and protecting the channel. We have already seen the added value it brings. The business has put digital at its core to deliver value to both sides of the buy-supply community."
Probrand CEO Peter Robbins said: “Transformation is expensive, challenging and demands great people. With customers changing how they discover and buy, reflected in the rise of B2B marketplaces, we are half way through our plan to remain relevant, and early results are very positive.
“Our platform is providing a materially different digital IP, delivering market differentiation, attracting new customers we otherwise would not have engaged, and unlocking future scale out into international geographies.”
He said sales of cloud and managed IT services have grown by 25% year-on-year as have digital services, “improving overall margin and profit for the period”.
