Toshiba is launching a bid to become laptop vendor of choice for Europe's SMBs. A special business model, claimed to be more resilient than those available to consumers, plus tools for management and updating, will be launched this week. Toshiba is launching a bid to become laptop vendor of choice for Europe's SMBs. A special business model, claimed to be more resilient than those available to consumers, plus tools for management and updating, will be launched this week.
Neil Bramley (below), B2B sales director for Northern Europe for Toshiba tells IT Europa: “It won't necessarily be more expensive than consumer models. We will be competitive in the marketplace.” He will aim for a best-value, given that higher reliability and a guarantee of both fix and money back if any part fails. “We have taken what we have learned from the Tecra and Portege models and applied it to the design of the new business model, the Satellite Pro R50-B.”
To push this into the marketplace, he is using the reinforced SMB channel in Europe. With the revising of its partner programme, building a pan-European partner portal and opening a multilingual support centre for partners Europe, he will use traditional VARs rather than retail to drive this initiative. He proposes a pull-through campaign, backed by other marketing to reach Europe’s SMBs, and manage them through an advanced CRM system which feeds leads and contacts back to channels. The pan-European partner portal, Toshiba's first, will be in place by year-end. The product will be available across Europe, for resellers of all types and through distribution, and no one particular region is being targeted because the SMB is so numerous and widespread.
To back this, in the event of a failure attributable to the laptop, Toshiba will repair it for free, and give customers their money back. This will appeal to SMBs who may not have dedicated IT resources, and who need to avoid lengthy periods of downtime, it says.
A new Toshiba Cloud Client Manager (TCCM) will aim to help SMB use of such mobile devices, managing security and device management and patch control, plus power management policies. This works with both Toshiba and other devices, though its own models have the advantage that Toshiba writes the BIOS and can use extra facilities this way. It is cloud-based, works like SaaS and will evolve over time, he says.
Channels have a chance to build proprietary solutions round this, adds Jeff Willis, director B2B Solutions Europe at Toshiba: TCCM offers endpoint management in the cloud or over existing networks.