Discount barebone computer

Supercom is making some strategic bets on Asus and little-known Synology for its reseller base.

Based in Markham, Ont., the company is one of the top distributors of Asus products. According to Edman Lau, Supercom's senior product manager, of the 5,000-plus notebooks the distributor ships out a month about 1,000 are either Asus-branded or Asus whitebook products.

The company's current offering is an Asus notebook with a 64-bit AMD Athlon mobile processor, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics chip, and a Western Digital 2.5-inch hard drive. All three components are exclusives in the Canadian market, said Lau.

"The 64-bit Athlon is not a desktop 64-bit CPU. Plus we are doing whitebook build-to-order for our reseller base in Canada using this chip," he said.

The Asus notebook can either be shipped branded as an Asus A2K series product with the choice of AMD Althon or Sempron chips or as a white book with a 'Powered by Asus' logo

Lau is also including a Christmas discount promotion on this product. Resellers can receive a 10 per cent discount on this exclusive notebook offering.

"Christmas comes early at Supercom," he said.

The promotion, which ends Dec. 31, also includes a free Asus notebook case, a Lexmark printer, McAfee AntiVirus with a year of updates, the game Far Cry, a two-year warranty and no charge assembly. For an additional $20 a mini-USB speaker set is thrown in.

Supercom is also upgrading its storage offerings by partnering with little-known Synology of Taiwan. It makes the DS-101 Disk Station, a network attached storage barebone system.

A Linux-based three-in-one server, the DS-101 does file, backup and printer tasks.

Priced at $245, it has a four-click install wizard and is able to handle mixed PC and Mac environments.

Lau said that the attached storage market will be worth more than $10 billion by 2008 and the distributor wants to be ready for it.

"The hot spot for storage is around 40 GBs, but that is not enough with all the MP3s and movie downloads that are happening today. You will need more hard drive space," he said.

He added that he has sourced these smaller companies out for the Canadian reseller base because they are smaller, newer companies who are aggressive.

"Our strength is to source our technology that is affordable for our reseller base," he said.

Besides the DS-101 Supercom will be offering the Asus WL-HDD Wireless Media Storage + Access Point product and the ReadyNAS 600, which Lau claims is the smallest RAID 5 NAS system in the world.