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Leading products, trustworthy service

First Distribution Digital Security & IoT aims to be Africa’s leading value-added distributor of IP video, advanced video analytics, high-density storage solutions, access control, fire detection, public address, IoT, and networking products. First Distribution, part of Epsidon Technology Holdings, was founded in 1984 as an innovator in the IT technology space by writing backup software and designing a QIC-02 tape streamer interface card.

The TEAC tape streamer mechanism became the base for the Epsidon Tape Streamer Backup System, sold primarily to the European market, Australia, and the USA, and a smaller percentage to the southern African market. The high volume of TEAC tape mechanisms purchased led to a proposal from TEAC that the company distribute its floppy disk drives. As the business grew, more products were brought on board, including motherboards, I/O cards, display cards and cases, and these components were distributed to the reseller community.

Due to customer demand for high-quality white boxes, First Distribution started assembling its white box product, which was branded the Epsidon PC. Concurrently, the IBM brand grew to more than 50% of the company’s total business. From early 2000, First Distribution’s focus became almost exclusively IBM branded products, which enjoyed substantial growth, ultimately leading to the gradual discontinuation of the white box brand.

The enterprise market

In 2002, IBM South Africa appointed First Distribution as a distributor for the full range of IBM Software products, thus completing First Distribution’s IBM product offering. In 2013, the company celebrated its 18th year of successful collaboration with IBM.

In 2005, First Distribution opened a networking business unit which distributed cable, fibre, and edge-of-network products. In 2009, a strategic decision was made to diversify the brands First Distribution offers its business partners.

An exclusive agreement for South Africa was entered into with Oracle on 1 December 2009. Following this and Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009, Oracle hardware was added to First Distribution’s distribution portfolio in July 2010.

First Distribution’s next new brand was VMware. While First Distribution had already been distributing VMware via the IBM OEM agreement for many years, the new agreement directly with VMware enabled it to use its extensive VMware skills with a new set of business partners that had previously not sold IBM or were hardware agnostic. EMC and RSA were added in July 2010, and sales grew phenomenally. First Distribution is proud of its success with this brand in the Enterprise and SMB markets.

Leading the move to cloud

A hosting division was created with the signing of the First Distribution Microsoft SPLA distribution agreement on 1 March 2011. Parallel to this, First Distribution also signed the VMware VSPP hosting agreement. This specialist team focuses on hosting solutions for the business partner community. Veeam and Commvault agreements were signed in early 2011, and these two offerings formed part of the First Distribution virtualisation ecosystem.

May of 2014 saw First Distribution leading the cloud market by launching First for Cloud, the country’s first cloud services brokerage. Seizing the opportunity offered by the growth of cloud in the IT industry, First for Cloud leverages the company’s strong and well-established relationships through connections to top-class cloud providers, offering resellers and their end user customers’ easy access to a wide array of the world’s very best cloud services.

First Distribution continued aggressively expanding its vendor portfolio, adding multiple world-class brands over the last few years, including McAfee, Huawei, VCE, LG, Riverbed, Lenovo, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Avaya, Veritas, and most recently, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

First Distribution was also awarded entry into Microsoft’s prestigious Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme in 2016, allowing the distributor to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services, and directly provision, manage and support Microsoft cloud offerings.

Security and surveillance market

In March 2020, First Distribution saw a gap in the market, so it expanded its service and product offerings into the security and surveillance space. The expansion included distribution agreements with many top-tier security vendors, giving access to video surveillance and IoT devices. With its already established partner network and our unprecedented relationships with data centre products, it is seeing significant growth in this area of its business.

The First Distribution model is based on delivering solutions through trusted, established resellers. Its client base has been built up through a history of consistent, trustworthy service and nurturing resellers as business partners. First Distribution’s unwavering commitment to its business partners, whose success it views as its own, ensures a keen understanding of its resellers’ needs, enabling First Distribution to bring maximum value to their endeavours.

The company prides itself on its ability to service market-leading brands in the enterprise IT market. It has been mandated by some of the world’s largest and most successful IT companies to distribute their products and services.

Find out more at https://firstdistribution.com/digital-security-iot/

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