Amplicon to sell QNAP's NAS storage

Industrial computing and networking specialist Amplicon has signed a distribution agreement with QNAP – one of Taiwan’s fastest growing NAS storage manufacturers. The deal is designed to enhance Amplicon's portfolio of Industrial IT products and provide customers with more choice when considering a total solution from Amplicon.

David Evans, Product Development Manager at Amplicon identifies the strategic thinking that underpins the move:

Market - According to market research specialists Gartner, the low cost NAS market grew by 64% in 2008. Customer feedback, particularly from the security, military and broadcast sectors also point to increased requirements for NAS for high bandwidth video storage and encrypted data storage.

Product positioning – The QNAP range of products occupy a unique space in the NAS market. Features such as iSCSI, AES encryption, redundant power supplies and extensive RAID capabilities position the products way above their very affordable price point.

Technology - There has been a major trend over the last decade for IT methodologies to be adopted in the industrial sector. PCs, Ethernet and TCP/IP are becoming the de facto technologies for industrial automation and NAS is the logical next step.

Value add – For Amplicon, the addition of NAS is not about shifting boxes. As experts in Industrial computing and networking, we can provide a complete solution and explain the benefits of NAS to customers in the industrial sector that may never have considered it before.
The QNAP range runs from low cost solutions for the SOHO market through to high capacity rackmount NAS boxes with redundant PSUs for mission-critical data storage applications. All new lines will be launched at Amplicon by the end of October 2009.
Shawn Shu, VP of Sales & Marketing at QNAP commented: “We are delighted to have Amplicon as a value add distributor and integrator in the UK. Their long history in the industrial market gives QNAP access to high-profile customers that many of our IT resellers cannot typically reach.”