automatic data capture
point of sale
Brand loyalty is key
IT Reseller spoke with Andrea Percival, managing director of Maxa Technologies, about the company’s background, its current solutions sets and what it considers to be its core USPs in the highly competitive world of distribution.
Transaction Solutions Inc. (ATSI). “There lies a lot of history because these moves influenced the types of products and solutions that Maxatec offered; including barcode printing and point-of-sale printing, and laid the foundation for where we are today,” reflected Maxatec’s Andrea Percival.
Going independent
Andrea Percival: “We prefer to concentrate on a select range of carefully chosen brands for each technology vertical we cover. In this way we also secure what we consider to be a more open relationship with our suppliers and channel partners.”
M
axa Technologies is an ISO 9001-certified supplier of hardware and services for the point-of-sale, auto ID
and mobile market sectors. Over four decades the company has built a solid reputation as one of the leading distributors in its field, with an extensive network of resellers in the UK and Mainland Europe, as well as the Middle East and Africa.
The company started out as Datac in the early 1970s. It was then acquired by the US-based DH Technology Group in the early 1990s. A number of other leading brands also joined the DH Technology stable around this time, including barcode label printer vendor Cognitive. Then, in 1998 the DH Group was acquired by US company Axiohm
16 IT RESELLER – MARCH 2011
The next big step was the management buyout of Maxa Technologies in 2003, as Percival explains: “When sales director Steve Berry and I successfully completed the management buyout one of the first things we set about doing was introducing the new Maxatec brand of products. We also took on board the Extech range of products – now part of Datamax-O’Neil – and this gave us a good foothold in the mobile printing world. We then expanded our product portfolio further. The reason we did this was
“
provide us with the opportunity to widen our customer base.”
Careful selection
Percival pointed out that Maxatec chooses its product ranges through a process of careful selection of suppliers. “In this way we have built up a strong group of products; everything from barcode & label printers, mobile computers including rugged tablet PCs and PDA devices, mobile & portable printers, cash drawers, point-of-sale (POS) terminals, digital signage solutions, kiosk printers and
“It’s not often that we find two of our resellers competing for the same project. This is largely because in the same way that we carefully select suppliers we have a similar approach to our resellers in order to reduce conflict in the marketplace.”
twofold. First, after the buyout a large part of our business still revolved around the printer product ranges associated with our former owners. So, to underline our independence, we expanded our product ranges, largely because we knew this would in turn
peripherals.” She added that, as well as Maxatec and Datamax-O’Neil, other brands in the current portfolio include Cognitive, TSC, Imaje, NCR, TPG, Zebex and Sumo digital
signage solutions. More recently Maxatec was
appointed a master distributor for Bluebird Soft’s
Pidion range of mobile computers; an agreement that covers UK and Ireland. In terms of target vertical markets, the Maxatec portfolio covers a lot of ground; including retail, hospitality & leisure, banking, healthcare & pharmacy, utilities & meter readings,
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